Re: Why not create packages?

[Stein Gjoen <sgjoen@mail.nyx.net>]

David Merrill wrote:
> Dan York wrote:
> > Gary & David wrote:
> > > >>>>> "D" == David Merrill <dcmerrill@mindspring.com> writes:

> > >     D> Dan York is stepping up to the plate and offering to do the
> > >     D> work; why not let him?

> > > If Dan has the resources to handle all the 140+ Linux distributions,
> > > and he wants to host the resulting archive, then I say go for it, but
> > > my expert opinion is that this is madness.

Could the people in know expand in this please? Just how do the various
distributions differ?

> > Ummm... I am willing to *help* with creating packages, but I don't
> > have the time, resources, or expertise to do it all myself.

> Should have written, "offering to do^H^Hhelp with the work".

What was proposed earlier was thta it might be a good startingpoint
to create a packaging tool where you input paramters such as
language (English, Japanese etc), format (HTML, text, PDF etc)
and so on and then you get a tarball out of it.

Progressing from there to a package in RPM or DEB would be the
next step.

> > I guess I didn't realize that the differences were so severe between
> > the various RPM-related distros and between Debian and Corel. I
> > thought that RPMs were basically the same, although admittedly they
> > put them in potentially different directories.

> If they are different, they ought *not* to be. There's no vendor
> specific requirement for this, and if it's not in the FHS it should be.

FSSTND: /usr/doc/
FHS:    /usr/share/doc/

It is mentioned in the specifications somewhere.

> > Perhaps LDP should specify a distribution-neutral location for all
> > the HOWTOs, such as /opt/doc or /opt/ldp.  Or perhaps this is /usr/doc.
> > It just seems like there should be a place for them to always reside.
> > Then the packages could just install into that dir and they could
> > work across all distros.

> Does anyone know the FHS guideline? I just looked on their website at
> the 2.0 version, but didn't even see /usr/doc listed. Seemed strange;
> maybe it was temporary blindness or something.

The directory /usr/share/doc is mentioned early on in
	http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-4.8.html
though it does not specify what is to go in below. Thus it seems we
can define a directory where within which we define the structure.
If we specify the structure it makes it far simpler to interlink the
various HOWTOs.

> > And perhaps it's just too much of a pain in the neck.

> Maybe so. But I'd also be willing to help. It can't be that hard to
> auto-generate current rpms in a script. I don't know anything about
> debian, but I've used rpm a little.

There has been some discussions on packaging tools earlier, you might
find something in the archives.

Regards,
   Stein Gjoen


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