Also a data point: reading rpm or dpkg files is not the challenge. The
challenge is providing (and maintaining) the base infrastructure that
dpkg and rpm expect. (ie a static bezerkly db for rpm, and a plethora of
support scripts (i.e. update-alternatives) for dpkg.) And finally,
grokking and processing correctly the dependency/conflicts/ording issues
that apply to dpkg and rpm. (There's not much point saying, hey guys,
build rpm's and setup will install them, if every single .spec file
needs to be altered because cygwin uses something different for a key
dependency. We've been through package renames. It used to be ugly, but
it's still not pretty.