On Tue, Aug 31, 1999 at 12:26:27AM +0100, James Green wrote:
BUT, how easy is it to make .debs? I grab a tarball or patch a tarball; I want to create a package to install; with rpm I have a reasonable change of having a .spec file to to the job with, what about Debian's system?
http://va.debian.org/~jaldhar/ is a fairly good introduction to the system. It's more complicated, but that's partly because of the higher QA on official debs. If you're just installing on one machine, there are other ways to make dpkg know about them.
Of course, the alternative is to wait for Debian to come out with a .deb, but how long does this take?
Speaking from when I last used Gnome, a few months ago, it depends how much risk you want to take. Debian stable lags a long way behind, unstable is up to a week behind, or if you take it directly from the staging area you'll get it the same day. (I don't know the current location of the staging area, though.) Stable is just that, stable. Unstable will burn you occasionally and taking from the staging area is liable to break at any time.
Well at least Windows has the one dominent system that practically *everyone* conforms to, Linux/Unix has RPM and deb and probably a couple of others; yes, rpm is domiment, but is hasn't compeletely penetrated the market, which I why I say a standard-across-distros GNU Packager is needed.
No, source tarballs are the standard that (nearly) everyone uses. There are prettier "autoconf"-type tools out there that dress the whole "configure; make; su -c 'make install'" up in pretty windows, too, but they've never really caught on.
There is a "standard-across-distros GNU Packager" (well, package management system) called stow out there. encap is the closest any distribution comes to a similar system.
MJR
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