On 31 August 2015 at 11:59, Wichert Akkerman <wichert@wiggy.net> wrote:
Sure. My knowledge of rpm is 20 years out of date, so I am going to focus the deb/dpkg/apt world only. The whole packaging system is build around archives. The packaging tools themselves do not have anything hardcoded there, they pick up the archive from a configuration file (/etc/apt/sources.list). That file lists all archives. [... Useful explanation omitted...]
Thanks, that was very helpful. From that I understand that the key differences are: 1. deb doesn't have a hard-coded "official" repository, everything is in the config files. 2. There are tools to manage the config, rather than editing the config files by hand. 3. There is pluggable support for archive and URL types. In the context of the PEP I don't think these are significant differences, so it seems to me that the PyPI solution proposed in the PEP matches pretty closely to the deb approach. Which is what I thought, but it's nice to have it confirmed. Thanks, Paul