Why are RPM's distro specific?
Elliot Lee
sopwith at redhat.com
Thu Jan 20 17:36:46 UTC 2005
It's great to see well-informed answers to fedora-list questions. We need
more people like Deron :-)
Kudos,
-- Elliot
On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Deron Meranda wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:00:47 -0500, Marc M <linuxr at gmail.com> wrote:
> > RPMs are for Redhat-based distributions only,
>
> Red Hat sponsored the development of the RPM format and software,
> but it is no longer just for Red Hat distributions. In fact, some people
> use RPM on commercial Unixes (non-Linux).
>
> But as said, the main reasons RPMs tend to be specific to a
> particular distro are,
>
> 1. Assumptions made about system configuration, such as
> pathnames to config file locations, boot script setups, existing
> users and groups, and so on.
>
> 2. Dependencies on other packages, including how those
> packages are named, compiled, or even in some cases
> where they are installed or what patches have been made
> to the virgin source.
>
> And of course the usually unstated: testing. Making sure
> that all the different packages do in fact work well together
> and don't cause conflicts.
>
> Thus, the "portability" of an RPM is mostly a factor of
> how self-contained the software is, versus how much
> it has to depend on or integrate into the rest of the
> system. For instance RPMs for man pages tend to
> be very portable, while an RPM for something complex
> like X is not too portable.
>
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