QUOTE
Ok, but WHY?
I can look inside an RPM and verify that what is there matches whats said to be there, and it can even contain md5 sums for authenticity.
Further, it gets into the RPM database, and can be removed, upgraded, dependency checked etc.
Can your installer do all this?
Not the one you can download. Thru professional services we can offer RPM-enabled installers, by that we mean :
- We can install RPMs as part of the installation process
- We can output an RPM instead of a binary installer (certain restrictions apply) which you can then install as usual
- We install as a binary installer, but we also register with the RPM database.
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If I use your installer and then upgrade/remove an RPM package skype depends on, will I be alerted to the about-to-be-broken dependency?
No, not currently. The purpose of the installer is not to replace RPM. The main advantages are :
- Works in any distribution (1)
- Can be installed/uninstalled by a regular user
- It provides a pleasant, easy to use user interface that displays license, README, can contain logo, creates Desktop shortcut, etc.
RPMs and DEBs are fine, but they are designed to really work with one particular distribution. Even if your application is completely crossplatform, it is very difficult to specify an RPM that will work in all platforms due to different dependency name conventions, etc. so you end up only supporting a few RPM platforms (usually Red Hat/Fedora and Suse) and to the rest of platforms just give a .tar.gz
This is what Skype is doing, for example. What we do is take that .tar.gz and make it attractive and easy to install for end-users, which is increasingly important as end-users coming from Windows backgrounds start using Desktop Linux.
Cheers
Daniel