Yet another package manager

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2004, A. Khattri wrote:
>On Thu, 23 Dec 2004, Bill Campbell wrote:
>
>> 	http://www.libertysoft.org/openpkg/overview/
>
>RPM! Bleh!

When I see a comment like that I get the impression the poster is juvenile
and inexperienced (do a google search on ``Johari Window'').

RPM, like any tool, can be misused, abused, and packages Done Badly(tm) --
see many Red Hat spec files.  The people who created the openpkg system
looked at many different package managers before deciding on RPM, and this
is addressed in third item in the FAQ:

	http://www.openpkg.org/faq.html

The openpkg system includes tools that take care of the dependency problems
such as David Bandel's cited, building scripts to install necessary
prerequisites for a package, and rebuild any packaged dependant on
installed packages (e.g. a new version of perl will automatically update
all perl modules and other packages dependent on perl).

The openpkg version of RPM has been modified to make building packages
considerably more palatable that vanilla RPM.  For example, the specfile,
sources, and patches are all under a single directory for each package
instead of being spread round the SPECS and SOURCES directories.  Another
feature is that all builds are designed to be done by an unpriviledged user
which minimizes the possibilities of poorly written spec files from
overwriting or deleting system files during the build process.

Bill
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