Multilib Middle-Ground

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Thu May 1 16:14:44 UTC 2008


On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 8:04 AM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
>  Unlike on Gentoo, the user doesn't have to rebuild the packages, only one
>  packager has to do it and all the users just get the packages from the
>  packager, be it from the Fedora repository or a third-party repository. The 'p'
>  word comes into play because proprietary licenses tend to disallow or at least
>  limit (e.g. no way to rebuild from source because you don't have it)
>  repackaging, which is the real cause of your problem.


And there's always the nosrc games you can play like jpackage does/did
to work around the distribution legalities for proprietary junk.

Even in a perfect world where all the rpm based distributions came to
an agreement on how to package everything self-consistently, we still
wouldn't have a mechanism to force proprietary vendors to use best
practices... not when there are tools like checkinstall out and about
to short-circuit the standard rpm packaging process for proprietary
distributors to abuse.

-jef




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