[openbeos] Re: Haiku distro guidelines [was: Haiku VmwareBuild Environment]

On 2008-04-17 at 22:33:11 [+0200], Andreas Färber <andreas.faerber@xxxxxx> 
wrote:
> Well, in that case your proposed file format still contains too much
> info. :-)
> 
> If it's just a storage format for AboutSystem, then all you need is
> name, copyright, license and optionally URL. A description is only
> necessary when it allows the user to decide whether or not to install
> (when browsing a list of packages on a server), and versioning afaiu
> needs to occur through the filename or otherwise it's not downloaded
> again.

I figured I rather add a few fields for info we might decide to show in 
AboutSystem as well. Including the version number isn't too bad an idea, I 
guess, and whether a description for less widely known packages is shown can 
still be decided. It shouldn't harm to them as optional fields in the 
format, at any rate.

> So if you do want a full-blown, self-describing installation package,
> then I do not understand why you want to define this format over night
> instead of evaluating prior art first - RPM, Deb, Autopackage, etc.

I have no intention of doing anything but a simple format for our optional 
packages ATM. All I want to do is get through with a rather small task that 
no one else volunteered to do.

> Also, as someone working towards helping with the Optional Packages, I
> see it as more difficult to get such a file (in whatever format)
> inside the same zip rather than storing it externally. Jars, RPMs and
> others are not created manually from `make install`, there are special
> tools, with text file input, to generate the packages. This would
> still be missing if defining a format and manually adding such files
> to existing zips.

You are not really telling me that you consider it a difficulty to add 
another file name to a "zip" command line or select another file for 
ZipOMatic, are you?

CU, Ingo

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