It's great to see well-informed answers to fedora-list questions. We need more people like Deron :-) Kudos, -- Elliot On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Deron Meranda wrote: > On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:00:47 -0500, Marc M <linuxr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > RPMs are for Redhat-based distributions only, > > Red Hat sponsored the development of the RPM format and software, > but it is no longer just for Red Hat distributions. In fact, some people > use RPM on commercial Unixes (non-Linux). > > But as said, the main reasons RPMs tend to be specific to a > particular distro are, > > 1. Assumptions made about system configuration, such as > pathnames to config file locations, boot script setups, existing > users and groups, and so on. > > 2. Dependencies on other packages, including how those > packages are named, compiled, or even in some cases > where they are installed or what patches have been made > to the virgin source. > > And of course the usually unstated: testing. Making sure > that all the different packages do in fact work well together > and don't cause conflicts. > > Thus, the "portability" of an RPM is mostly a factor of > how self-contained the software is, versus how much > it has to depend on or integrate into the rest of the > system. For instance RPMs for man pages tend to > be very portable, while an RPM for something complex > like X is not too portable. >
