Auto Package

[Tollef Fog Heen]

* Mike Hearn 

| > How did you find out that your software was not packaged the way you would
| > like?  
| 
| A constant stream of bug reports that when investigated turned out to be
| caused by broken packaging. Debian was not alone in this, Gentoo was the
| next worst offender. In both cases the packaging for these distributions
| was redone by upstream developers, and in both cases the robustness of
| this software improved massively. Since we pulled Debian packaging
| upstream there have been far fewer complaints and bug reports.
| 
| Yes, in theory all these bugs should have been reported to Debian first
| then sent upstream. In practice they were not.

Then you have counterexamples where the Debian packaging has improved
the upstream software massively.  I think libtool is a good example
here.

[...]

| No, the Apple techniques are nothing like apt or .deb. The PKG files are
| more similar to MSI files. They aren't managed or controlled by Apple. The
| "appfolders" are directories with some magic metadata inside, which are
| allowed to depend on themselves and the OS but nothing else. There is a
| very clear separation between the system and the applications, which is
| why that works. Weak linkage is used instead of having applications
| upgrade core OS components. 

This sounds a lot like LSB and LSB packages.  Why reinvent that wheel?

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-