Neat package manager...

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 12:00:03AM -0500, Jerry McBride wrote:
>
>Hi Bill,

>Yes, I've looked at it, but all it seems to provide is a different way to
>skin a cat... an rpm cat at that.

There are some very good reasons for using RPM, and this is discuessed in
some depth on their web site.

>Have you had the chance to work with it? If so, what's the advantages over
>RH's rpm?

I've been working extensively with openpkg for several months now on SuSE
8.1, Caldera 3.1.1 and eDesktop 2.4, and freebsd.  My real impetus to do
this was having to move all our Linux stuff from Caldera to another
distribution, and I wanted to do it in such a way that we could be Linux
distribution agnostic as well as making it easy to move back and forth to
freebsd and OS X.

I've started doing some documentation on this for use here:
	http://www.celestial.com/doc/openpkg/

  1.  It's designed for portability, and runs on a variety of Linux
      platforms, freebsd, solaris, and several other Unix systems.

  2.  It is totally independent of the vendor's packaging system.  This has
      several advantages, not the least of which is that the vendor's
      automatic updates still work regardless of what is installed under
      openpkg.

  3.  It has its own directory structure which is modelled on standard Unix
      practice so you don't have to worry about where the vendor puts
      things.

  4.  There is a large selection of SRPMS available that provide everything
      necessary for ISP servers.  These all have been configured to work
      together, and are the same regardless of the target system.  There
      are some desktop SRPMS, but the emphasis is on the server side.

Bill
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