As I mentioned yesterday ,scripts in packaging systems are an opportunity to make mistakes. Thus,one thing that RPM could do to improve is to automate as many of thethings that are done repeatedly in install and removal scripts (of whichRPM has several variants).

There are two improvements that jump out at me. First, many packagesonly do things when they are being actually installed or removedinstead of being upgraded (and sometimes do other things during anupgrade). Right now people detect these cases by boiler

Once upon a time it was popular to laugh at package systems like RPMand say that all you really needed was ' make install '. This attitudemissed the point, because the importance of good package systems isthat they let you easily remove things .

This matters because it encourages experimentation with packages.If removing a package is difficult and painful, it's a fairly bigcommitment to just install a package in the first place. If removing apackage is easy and reliable, then installing packages is not at all