Ralph Angenendt wrote:

Jim Perrin wrote:

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On 5/18/07, Giovanni g.trovato@kelinformatica.it wrote:

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Inconpatibility CentOS 5 64 Bit + VMware Server ?

I don't believe so, no. But then, vmware server isn't a true 64bit application. You have to install a number of the x86 compatibility packages in the 64bit tree.

That could be half-automatic if they actually learned to package correctly:

[angenenr@shutdown ~]$rpm -qR VMware-server /bin/sh [angenenr@shutdown ~]$

Is it possible to package "correctly" for more than one flavor/version of a linux distribution (or even just across all the fedora/RHEL/Centos variations)?

Ralph Angenendt wrote:

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That could be half-automatic if they actually learned to package correctly:

[angenenr@shutdown ~]$rpm -qR VMware-server /bin/sh [angenenr@shutdown ~]$

Is it possible to package "correctly" for more than one flavor/version of a linux distribution (or even just across all the fedora/RHEL/Centos variations)?

Package for the Enterprise Distributions? There aren't that many of them.

=:)

Maybe, but 3.x is wildly different from 5.x, and it needs to run across all the fast-changing fedora versions too. My question is whether it's possible to package something like this such that yum would do the right thing regardless of the platform.

Ralph Angenendt wrote:

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Maybe, but 3.x is wildly different from 5.x, and it needs to run across all the fast-changing fedora versions too. My question is whether it's possible to package something like this such that yum would do the right thing regardless of the platform.

They could just put a spec file into the tar ball - which would help people who want to build their own packages. Ah well, I'm gracious today

• they can add a debian/ directory also.

I tend to look at this from the other direction. Why should someone who wants to give away an application be forced to build a zillion variations just because the distributions can't come up with a single way for a program to work? There has to be a better way to make something unix-like... Note that even when a vendor really goes out of their way to build RPM's (like vmware, sun java, etc.), RH manages to disagree with where things should land and break them. Why shouldn't any package that ever worked continue to do so? Solaris seems to make this claim...