"Mikhail Skobov" <russianhippie666 at gmail.com> wrote: > so you're saying to not use rmp or w/e and use the tar way? No, Mikhail. Stick w/rpm and the other tools that SUSE uses to install software. He was simply ranting at the general concept of munged library naming that some distributions use for their packages, some complaint about default search paths (which is overcome with LD_LIBRARY_PATH), and a general snipe at developers that hard-code path names in their applications. Nothing really to do with rpm, dpkg, or tarballs. rpm's, deb's, and package-style tarballs all contain binary data, meta data on where to install it on the system, and what prerequisites are needed before the software can work. rpm's are cpio archives with a meta-data header. deb's are ar archives containing two tarballs and a file or two: control.tar.gz, data.tar.gz, and version. Slackware tarballs were... Well, you get the picture. Eventually, someone will say, "Why doesn't everyone do what NeXT does, and by virtue what Mac OS X does, by shipping self-contained software packages?" Someone will say that what we have is good enough. Someone else will state that LSB will save us all. Etc. Horses will be beaten (or is it eaten), and eventually, someone will state someone else is a Nazi; the thread will have officially ended. -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/ assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */