Re: setup wishes -- any volunteers

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 10:09:11AM +1100, Robert Collins wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Christopher Faylor [mailto:cgf@redhat.com]
>> Sent: Friday, March 23, 2001 9:52 AM
>> To: cygwin-apps@cygwin.com; cygwin-developers@cygwin.com
>> Subject: Re: setup wishes -- any volunteers
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 09:27:08AM +1100, Robert Collins wrote:
>> >I know this has been said before, but what about leveraging of an
>> >existing packaging format - dpkg has all the capabilities 
>> you cite, and
>> >they had a win32 project in place at one time. I'mm willing 
>> to polish my
>> >elbows this weekend and see if I can make something work : 
>> but first I
>> >would like a little buy-in that this is a good route to take.
>> 
>> This gives you dependencies but I don't see that it provides you with
>> anything else.
>
>the debian format does nested dependencies based on features (ie vi
>requires curses, curses is supplied by ncurses, multi sources of
>features - ncurses provides termcap, as does terminfo (yes I know these
>aren't accurate :]). It has _many_ existing retrieval tools & formats
>(http/ftp/file system/nfs/even rsync I think) and a build environment to
>build the packages. (Oh, and a pretty wide volunteer developer base for
>the format, so no commercial realities should intrude :]) [just ignoring
>_my_ day job for a moment, which is not cygwin related...]

Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where corporate reality would
intrude.  I really can't promote a debian based solution, unfortunately.
 
>> You'd have to build a non-cygwin version of rpm to handle all of this.
>> I don't know how feasible that would be.
>
>It's not RPM. It's not a religious preference, but IMO the dpkg format
>is much more flexible than rpm...

It probably is.  I have no engineering preference either way but I do
have a political preference.  People have actually asked me, from time
to time, to implement a comple RPM based installation.  A lot of the
packages are in RPM now both on cygwin.com and on the sourceforge site
whose name escapes me.

I really can't back a dpkg plan.  I am sorry that I didn't make this
clear before.

cgf