new distro (and versioning)

[Jonathan Hale]

----- Original Message -----
From: Gerald Combs <gerald at ethereal.com>
To: Jonathan Hale <maclaoch at earthlink.net>
Cc: Brian Densmore <DensmoreB at ctbsonline.com>; <kclug at kclug.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2002 11:24 AM
Subject: Re: new distro (and versioning)

> CVS might be useful, but it probably won't do everything you need.  It's
> great at taking snapshots of a directory tree and managing different
> branches and versions, but not so great at helping you manage
> dependencies.
>
> {Free|Net|Open}BSD use CVS to manage their ports/packages systems.  They
> provide a directory tree that you can sync using CVS.  The directory tree
> is organized by category and contains makefile targets that let you
> compile and install various applications.  Dependencies are handled by the
> makefile scripts (which makes sense - 'make' is all about dependency
> checking, after all).  More information and a browsable ports tree can be
> found at http://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html.
>
> A while back one of the FreeBSD core developers started a project to unify
> the BSD ports/packages system and make it available for other OSes,
> including Linux. The site is at http://www.openpackages.org, but hasn't
> seen much activity for a while.  Which is too bad, since I'd love to be
> able to use the ports system under Linux and Solaris.  I like it a lot
> better than other packaging systems I've used including Red Hat, Solaris
> (SVr4), Debian, SCO, HP, IBM, and DEC/Compaq.

Thanks for the info... Like I said before, I'm really not all that familiar
with either... but I was reading about Subversion in a Linux magazine this
month... and how it's supposed to be better at tracking changes than CVS...
and thought: "Hey, I wonder if there's something from there that we could
use..."

Also, jumping back a few replies to Apt having support for RPM based distros
like Conectiva (though it won't install .debs on those)... Apt has Deb
Orphan to help keep things straight... Anyone know if THAT includes support
for the RPM based distros... or if there's a version of something out there
that does?