On Fri, Oct 09, 1998 at 01:41:07PM +0200, Soren S. Jorvang wrote:
> Yes yes, but in the context of snarfing compatibility libraries
> (which I take it do not themselves vary greatly between distributions)
> for use with (the) NetBSD (package system), how do the distributions
> compare?

We use SuSE at our company and have made good experiences with it.

> How do SuSE (and Debian) gather in the sources for building their
> packages?

A SuSE CD ROM set comes with a disk full of source RPMs. These RPMs
contain the original source archive(s) and a bunch of patches.

> How are they stored (on the net)?

Most of the SuSE distribution is available on the net. The only part
which is missing AFAIK is there installation tool "yast" which we
don't need anyway.

A few more words why I want a RPM based distribution:
"rpm" allows to install packages for another operating system with a root
directory different from "/". My goal is to create a linux package which
allows to install additional Linux packages with a simple shell command.
So if you want to run e.g. the linux Netscape package you install the
"linux_suse" packege first and use "linuxrpm -i netscape.rpm" afterwards.

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                http://home.owl.de/~tron/