Is RPM Doomed?

Ladislav Bodnar writes "This is an opinion piece offering solutions for all the ills of the RPM Package Manager. It has been written with Slashdot in mind - it is a fairly controversial topic and I would like to hear the experiences and views of other users who have tried different package formats and different Linux distributions. The conclusions are pretty straightforward - either the big RPM-based distributions get together and develop a common standard or we will migrate to distributions offering more sophisticated and trouble-free package management. Note: the main server allows a maximum of 100 simultaneous connections. To limit the /. effect, here are two other mirrors: mirror-us and mirror-hu (the second one has larger fonts). Thanks in advance for publishing the story."

Comments

Re:standardized locations, etc.

[0x0d0a]

I think the biggest thing we need with rpm (and other distro systems) is standardized package locations.

That's already done in the LSB.

The problem is that each rpm is required to contain a static list of files it installs *with pathnames*. The nice thing about this is that it lets you run rpm -qip foo.i386.rpm without executing any code (sandboxed or otherwise) to see the list of files. The stupid thing is that there then has to be a totally different rpm for every distro and every maintainer.

In addition, it means that the maintainers need to keep *two* lists of what files are in the package -- one list for "make install" and the other for rpm. This is probably the most annoying design decision of RPM I've seen. There needs to be a FILES file with a list of installed files with a gen-files script (that runs sandboxed to build FILES for not-yet-installed packages and is run at package installation time to generate FILES). Have the Makefiles read this for make install. This would make life easier for maintainers (one list of files to install), would make RPMs more reliable (no accidental adding of a file to the Makefile but not to the spec file), and would let an RPM work on any distro (if we ever get the gcc-2.7, gcc-2.96, gcc-3 stuff worked out).

even though the newer libraries could do the job of the older ones

This is true for minor version number increases, but for a major version number change, newer libraries cannot simply link to the program.

Also, the registry is a fucking stupid idea. (despite the fact that GNOME and KDE are mindlessly cloning it). The registry causes more problems than anything else I've seen on a Windows system. The MacOS did things right -- let all your centralized databases just be caches for data that can be rebuilt from files around your system. If something gets borked or corrupted...that's okay. Absolutely do *not* make your single copy of data a registry -- put the masters around the system, and let the centralized db be rebuilt if necessary.

Also, registries require "installations" and "uninstallations" instead of just copying files. You can just copy appropriate files from one system to another and run code on a Linux or MacOS box. On a Windows box, you're in for running installers to poke at the registry. And finally, I've seen tons of broken Windows installers that poke at registry entries and end up completely screwing up data that some other app uses. For example, a friend once had Sonique and WinAmp installed, but couldn't associate mp3s with either. I took a look at the registry -- Microsoft's two-entry file association scheme let the extension entry point to a nonexistent application entry, IIRC. As a result, the mp3 entry didn't show up in the Folder Options dialog in Explorer, and couldn't be reassigned, and WinAmp and Sonique kept giving errors when trying to grab associations.

The day any distro starts requiring a registry is the day I never touch that distro again. Right now, I can just uninstall GNOME if I want to do so.

Oh, and another thing. The Windows registry is a *massive* shared database. As a result, tons of stuff modifies it and causes internal fragmentation and loss of physical continuity between related keys. Then all apps use the registry heavily (God, I hate apps that poll it), so you get slow app launch times, that annoying disk churning that you hear on Windows boxes...rrrgh.

Take a look at .dll registration. On Windows, the only way the OS knows about a .systemwide dll is when you've added an entry to the registry for it. On Linux...run ldconfig, and it rebuilds the systemwide cache (ld.so.cache), which is significantly faster (contiguous, not incrementally modified, not modified by all sorts of other apps storing filename associations and the like) to read.

The registry is basically a hack, because Windows *used* to have what MS considered a worse scheme (.ini files). It isn't a very well thought out system.

Binary Distros Are Dead

[FreeUser]

Well, not quite, but now that I've got your attention... :-)

It isn't the packaging format really ... most of the issues raised are inherent to binary based distros, which with todays processors really should become a thing of the past.

Source Mage and Gentoo[1] are two excellent source based distros that avoid these classes of problems altogether, and unlike RPM (or debs[2]) add no burden to the upstream software developer.

Shawn Gordon of The Kompany touches on this when he says (from the article, you did read the article, right?)

So rather than providing a myriad of different binary RPMs for the dozens of different Linux distribution, The Kompany, which is a commercial entity developing Linux applications, reluctantly decides to give away the source code to paying customers. [Emphesis added]

Source based distros like Gentoo and Source Mage have packaging systems that automate the process of downloading, configuring, compiling, and installing all of the software on their systems from source (pedants will note there is the occasional binary package, e.g. NVidia drivers, but for the vast, vast majority of software my point holds). Indeed, this approach makes the packaging system itself less important (so long as it works properly) than the overall engineering and organization of the distro itself, and completely irrelevant to the software developer (as it should be).

This has a couple of disadvantages, and a whole bunch of real advantages. So much so that almost no one who has used a source based distro will go back to a binary based distro once they've tried it, despite the cons (in fact, of the numerous people I know who've tried Source Mage and Gentoo, both very different from one another BTW, I know of not a single person who has gone back to their old binary favorite, be it Suse, Mandrake, Red Hat, or Debian).

• • CONS of source based distros
    
    
  • Initial install typically requires source to all of the system, which is generally downloaded from the net. I.e. in most cases requires a fat pipe for installation.
  • The installation is time consuming, due to the fact that each package must be compiled. For modern CPUs this isn't such a big deal (a day will suffice, most of which you can spend away from the computer while it chugs away), but for older CPUs like an AMD K6 233 I have, the initial install can literally take days.
• • PROS of source based distros
    
    
  • Updates and upgrades typically require much less bandwidth than their binary equivelents, as only the new package's source needs to be downloaded.
  • The software is compiled optimized for your hardware. Typically such systems run 20-30% faster than their binary equivelents, based on some casual benchmarking I and a few others have done.
  • The software is compiled against the exact library versions installed on your system, so no subtle incompatabilities arise due to slightly mis-matched binaries. This eliminates a whole class of bugs, and a whole host of problems that can affect stability and reliability.
  • In the case of Gentoo, you have very precise control over the configuration of your system, and what is installed vs. what is not, as well as where it is installed to.
  • In the case of Source Mage, the system is auto-healing, meaning that if and when a new library is installed and the older one removed, all packages that rely on that library are recompiled against the new library. This makes upgrades (on Source Mage) very easy.
  • Upgrades are very easy. In the case of Source Mage they are virtually automatic (you select the package to update and everything is taken care of for you), in the case of Gentoo they are less automatic and require some care, but are nevertheless easier than with any binary distribution I've ever tried (and I've used all the major ones at one time or another), and with Gentoo the flexibility of having multiple versions of libraries and even runtime apps is very useful.
  • Security is improved in one way: the ease and ability to keep up with security updates. Binary distros are still trying to get this to work smoothly (and mostly not succeeding, or requiring a tradeoff like Debian Stable, in which one must run 2 year-old software to enjoy that level of security). This is really a side effect of the previous point, but is significant enough to deserve sepearate mention.
  • The ability to run current hardware. Again, this goes back to the ease and stability of upgrades inherent in source based distros like Source Mage and Gentoo. Source Mage had X 4.2 out a day after its release, giving its users the advantages of all the new features and bug fixes it had to offer. Ditto for KDE 3. Gentoo had these packages out almost as quickly. This means users get the latest features, and the latest bug fixes, almost immediately, in contrast to binary distros that typically require 3-6 months (worse for some distros. I still recall the Debian developers irate answer to a user's question on when thye could expect X 4.2 support in the experimental version of Debian ("unstable"), to the effect of "leave me alone, it will be months!")

There are numerous other advantages I could add here, but you get the idea.

The entire article on the flaws of RPM might better be entitled "The Flaws of Source Based Distributions" which, in the age of Free Software and source code availability, coupled with todays fast processors, really ought to become a thing of the past. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Debian, Suse, Mandrake, and Red Hat all embracing the notion of source-based distros sometime in the future ... as processors get even faster, the day long install (on my dual 1 GHz P3), which has already shrunk to less than half a day on the dual 2GHz Athlon I have at work, will shrink even more, to a couple of hours or less.

And the advantages in speed, stability, and ability to keep current with new software releases in a timely manner will only become more acute as time goes on.

So while binary based distros are by no means dead (despite my rather provocative headline), it is my opinion that the writing is certainly on the wall, and the ovservant person can already mark the shifting change in the wind.

[1]There are other source based distros as well, including Linux from Scratch and Lunar Penguin, and likely others as well.
[2]Though in fairness the Debian developers take up most if not all of that burden