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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Did I just solve the packaging problem? (please feel free to tell me why I'm wrong) (feddit.uk)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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You know what I just realised? These "universal formats" were created to make it easier for developers to package software for Linux, and there just so happens to be this thing called the Open Build Service by OpenSUSE, which allows you to package for Debian and Ubuntu (deb), Fedora and RHEL (rpm) and SUSE and OpenSUSE (also rpm). And then the dudes that do AUR packages can take a deb package and write a PKGBUILD that installs it on Arch and Artix. I think I just solved the universal packaging problem.

And maybe we can get OBS to add PKGBUILD support....

Also, feel free to let me know what you think about it as I'm genuinely curious: did I miss anything obvious? Thanks

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Why would PKGBUILD solve the issue? The packaging issues are still the same, as every distro has different package names, revisions and not all packages in their repository. The dependencies are not solved with this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

If at all, you want to use Gentoo's ebuild system, which can be seen as some kind of superset of PKGBUILDs. I guess one could write a Python script that “dumbs down” ebuild scripts to PKGBUILDs for simple packages (excluding complex stuff like kernel, KDE, …). The main challenge, as pointed to before, would be maintaining a table mapping package names between distributions in order to get the dependencies right.