[Rpm-metadata] Debian metadata (was Re: format misc)

[Jeff Johnson]

Jeff Licquia wrote:

>On Wed, 2003-10-08 at 19:10, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Perhaps Suggests: and Recommends: might become synonyms too?
>>    
>>
>
>I don't expect they will; they have two different meanings.
>
>You can think of Depends, Recommends, and Suggests as three levels of
>dependency, each weaker than the previous.  "Depends" means "unusable
>without".  "Recommends" means "technically, you can get along without
>it, but you probably don't want to".  "Suggests" means "nice, but not
>that important".
>  
>
>And now we have "Enhances" which is a reverse "Suggests".  "Package A
>Enhances package B" is the same as "B Suggests A".
>
rpm packaging is missing one of Recommends: ,  Suggests:, or Enhances: but
which one has always been unclear to me because rpm based distros tend 
to lack
the administrative controls necessary to establish correct behavior when 
the behavior
is based on subjective consensus on The Right Thing To Do.

No matter what, none of the values belong in package content, but rather
associated with packages, because rebuilding a package just to change the
metadata can never fix packages already burned on cdrom.

Perhaps rpm-metadata might be used to augment rpm's missiing dependency. 
Dunno,
not really my call, might be tricky to establish a new 
installer/depsolver tag.

>>Catch me on rpm-devel at colug.net (not yet public, announce in a week or two),
>>where you will find me attempting a unified package manager project
>>for linux. Wish me luck!
>>    
>>
>
>Interesting.  I do wish you luck; I imagine you'll need it. :-)
>
>I'm not sure I have the luxury of another mailing list, though; all
>those important Microsoft security updates are taking up all my time.
>:-)
>  
>

C'est dommage.

73 de Jeff