LSB compatible Samba ?

[Steve Langasek]

On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, Jeremy Allison wrote:

> <SOAPBOX ON>
> Grrr. Deal with it ! You touched a raw nerve for me here.
> Having gone through the UNIX wars of the 80's and 90's,
> all the while watching Microsoft win as the UNIX vendors
> waged bloody internecine wars I will *never* forgive the
> people who refused to standardize on rpm and thus split
> the application vendor base for Linux.

Ah... it's unforgivable to be unwilling to abandon a technically-superior
system that has been in use for almost as long as (if not longer than) rpm has
been in existence?  I hardly think that Debian's insistence on using .debs
internally for their distribution is going to be the death of commercial
software on Linux.

Not everyone has the same goals for their Linux distributions as RedHat does.
That it's unforgivable for someone to continue using Linux in line with
*their own* goals seems a bit harsh, IMHO.  That's supposed to be part of what
the GPL protects.

> Yes it's technically inferior to apt-get and friends. It
> just happens to be the standard packaging mechanism. It's
> also GPL code. If you don't like it *FIX IT*, don't
> whine....

'Standard' and 'most common' are not synonyms.  The only standard which
specifies rpm as a package format is now the LSB, and even the LSB doesn't
specify the use of rpm as the underlying package management system.  Which is
good, because the standard wouldn't go nearly as far if it tried to mandate
that distributions make such fundamental changes to their structure.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer