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Gentoo Linux Rethinks Package Management System
YOU ARE SO FIRED! writes "In an effort to conform to the LSB standards, Gentoo Linux will be adopting RPM as the standard form of package management in portage 2.1. More information can be found in the Gentoo weekly newsletter. I'd surely be fired if I would've proposed such an idea!"
And a Happy April to everyone!! :)
libertarianswag.com
Best Torll EVA
while I'm at it; fp!
You can't fire me! I QUIT!
At last, we Debian users have a legitimate reason to snub Gentoo.
Just kidding! Happy April Fools' Day everybody.
that we all use RPM to manage our packages.
Ouch! I guess I want 0 rpms for my package.
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it. - Gen. George Patton
I was pissed.. Until I realized the GWN is dated April 1.. Haha... damn.. had me for a few seconds there.. Bastards! :)
Thank you. Drive through. (:wq)
I can't speak for the community in general, but RPMs are the number 1 reason I started to avoid redhat. The idea that the build script et al is inside the package and kept away from the user is pretty absurd in my opinion. This was what drove me into the arms of BSD. Linux called me back for it's hardware support, but after a decision like this, I'll be hard pressed to stick with gentoo. Or, another perspective, how is this not debian, once and again?
The Red Hat Package Manager system is convienent for those of us who are not very capable at compiling source code and the like. It provides ease of use basically, and that is the objective I think that they are trying to obtain by conforming to the .RPM standard. Sure it may not be as complicated and therefore not as geeky, but it will save the not-so-nerdy people some time, which is good because the world needs to be exposed to more Open Source Software
OMG OMG OMG WTF OMG WTF BBQ STFU RTFM, OMFG OMG OMG OMG ROFL LMAO OMG WTF STFU ROFLMAO
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My heart jumped about 3 feet before I rememberd it is April 1.
I'll just remember to disregard everything for the next 24 hours.
Come to think of it, most of the stories are misleading anyway. Why should 1 April be any different.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=gentoo-user&r=1&w= 2
Check the above link for some of the gentoo-user mailing list archives - discussion started a few minutes after the newsletter went out. Common consensus is that it's April Fools - killing the package management system that makes Gentoo unique and requiring X is just too big a step to make without any discussion on the gentoo-dev list. Kurt did a really good job on this one if Slashdot bit!
Actually; I would agree with you except for who submitted the story. Being accepted was probably the last thing that particular troll was expecting.
I can hardly believe that I just read that Gentoo would adopt RPM. The backlash for this move should be significant! NOOOOOOOOO! "Note: This is an April Fool's joke.". Gotta love it.
Of course, its quite comforting to get this news on April 1st rather than any other day. I think I'll observe a day of mourning for what could have been, and then get back to compiling updates from source on April 2nd. Hehe.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
It must be getting around that time of year ... April, huh?
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I just had a f***ing heart attack, until I thought about that for a minute or two. First time (in ALL honesty) I've EVER been taken in by an April Fool's joke. Shame on you, DRobbins! SHAME ON YOU!!!
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
I want to see this post translated to Snoop Doggy Style...
"Ho, lizzen up! In a izzeffort to conform to da LSB stizzandards, Gizzentoo Linux will be..."
Anyone care to trizanslate this mo betta? My Doggy Style is rusty.
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it. - Gen. George Patton
Unfortunately all of us West-Coast people who dont realize that there is a time difference dont have the April 1'st status displaying on our computer clocks. We're ovbiously in the dark here.
OMG OMG OMG WTF OMG WTF BBQ STFU RTFM, OMFG OMG OMG OMG ROFL LMAO OMG WTF STFU ROFLMAO
Alright, I read the previous story and saw right through it and then fell for this. I am truly an April's Fool.
Linux O Muerte!
...couldn't we at least hold off April Fool's jokes until--and I admit this is a long shot--April Fool's Day?
Yeah, it sure would suck if there was a way for all linux users to install binary distributions without a ton of headaches!
good thing you still have to build everything from source to make sure it works.
phew! you had me going.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
And they also patent their emerge utilities, and sell them to the U.S. Treasury Department for $20 million, which should fund Gentoo for at least 120 more years.
/dev/taxpayers > irs | grep -i April_fools
cat
I have to say, I am off my game this year, one story, and I already fell for it. I clicked through to the story thinking "what the hell, this is soo stupid"....
"Note: This is an April Fool's joke."
---
Kwanza is not a Polish holiday!
IMHO, something I've long thought about regarding LSB is that there should be a Package Management specification. Much like the way IEEE defines specifications for things, ANSI, ISO, and so on.
.spec files are written. It should provide more feature sets. i.e. Why does redcarpet, up2date, urpm, and others provide auto package dependancy checking and fulfillment while the standalone "rpm" base program doesn't? Yes, I know apt does, but I'm speaking only from within the realm of RPM. There are similiar tools available that do different things, on the same side of the fence.
After that, it should be up to a developer to decide how to implement that standard and thus conform to it. I like RPM. It's pretty easy to write for and deal with, at least for me, but I feel it is lacking a lot of things that I think it should have by now.
It should be more modular, with regards to how package
This is why I believe a full-on specification for what RPM is should be better established than it is today. IMHO, this offers people a much better reason to decide rpm over apt or apt over rpm or whatever else, when the playing field is leveled.
Wishful thinking I guess.
--SuperBug
Apparently they don't have a lot of faith in their users' sense of humor and ability to figure things out for themselves... ;-)
It -is- April Fools Day in a largish chunk of the world. In fact, if you take noon as the traditional cut off for jokes, April Fools day had already finished in Australia by the time this was posted.
...We wouldn't want our various versions of Linux to actually agree on ONE standard for package management, after all! :P
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
... and so it begins!
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
Damn I really got scared to bones!.. I live in Mexico and here we dont have aprils fool, we do have an equivalent but on another day... You really got me unprepared
It appears before 1 April so I must be true. I've found drobbins the other day in a pub surrounded by hot chicks wore nothing but undersized red-hat t-shirts. He was sold obviously. It was not suprising in view of his track record - I really saw him speaking good of all-evil-gnu-veiled JFS, while he should have praise the other pure GNU projects which don't have backed by evil-empires-as-you-know-them, and then I saw buckets of money on his desks with blue thank you notes. He has been sold no less than once, why would I surprise next time he migrate .NET to Gentoo!
...since my GNOME fish died last night.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
sick sons of bitches...
Besides, didn't fool me for two seconds. Gentoo is all about sources.
...too bad in all of Central and Western US, it's still March 31st. Joke's on YOU! :-)
was that they included security updates with this little joke. Other than that, it was a good joke! Caught me off guard for a second. :)
The only reason I keep my Windows partition is so I can mount it like the bitch that it is.
No one ever takes an article posted on April 1st with any seriousness.
..It could happen!
One of these days, it'll be like "Saddam fights back against Bush! Thousands of Iraqi troops entering American borders." and we'll all be like "GahahaA!!"
Next thing we know, we're all wearing turbans and riding mules to work.
- shazow
it ... doesn't ... stop ... for ... a ... long ... time ... come ... back ... in ... 24 ... hours ... just ... a ... bunch ... of ... wankers ... damn ... april ... fools ... it ... ain't ... funny ... no ... more ... pathetic
Don't know if this will be funny, just ask how funny felt the gentoo fans about a rpm migration (at least it could had been a migration to .deb)
This was a clever April Fool's post. It caught me by surprise. Well done, Slashdot.
Of course, what I'm not looking forward to is the next twenty-four hours, when Slashdot will be filled with nonstop April Fool's jokes, completely defeating the purpose of April Fool's day.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
I just got my 5 superanifty mod points, and its 15 minutes (EST) into April Fools' Day. How in the hell am I supposed to use these things now?
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
the 1 day every year that nerds throughout the world refuse to acknowledge that actual news might happen, and decide to just play jokes on each other all day...
bash#>rpm -e April_Fools.4.1.20-03.src.rpm
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I was so scared, I soiled myself. Now excuse me while I go change my armor....
Just in case anyone's really confused:t ter.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20030401-newsle
Why is RPM specified in the LSB anyway? Just because its the "most common"? Even that may be debatable.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Really, who did this fool? Come on, step-forward... there has to be ONE of you.
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
/. to switch to IIS?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
If only we could find out that LSBs requirement to use RPM was also an April Fool
There is a thread in the Gentoo forums about this.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
If this isn't a vaid reason to fork I dont know what is.
Yes I know what the date is.
Its not even April 1 here yet! ;) (CST)
Who is the fool?
One who ruins his reputation as a credible news source by posting false stories once a year?
or
One who believes the false stories?
There should be a recommendation, not a specification. Let me explain:
There will be some linux systems wherein zero file manipulation occurs on the system image. Perhaps the files are rsynced from a master, or certain filesystems are network mounted. Or perhaps the system is COTS and boots from flash. Clearly, a package management system would be inappropriate in each case.
Or, perhaps the system is running in a limited environment, and the most basic techniques are being used to maintain it (ie shell scripts, cp, mv, ln, etc.) to reduce space or complexity.
Finally, choosing one true package manager would be limiting. Why? Because we have at least 3 or 4 modern choices right now, and if one gets chosen for linux, the others might stagnate, or be adopted by other Unicies. And they could become popular, only to break the LSB when we clamor to get them back.
And why should the application developer be limited to how he chooses to distribute his software? A developer for Windows users will have his pick of at least 3 different installation systems (with the back-end state, but not dependancy management, handled by Windows). And it's no easier to do "relocations" and "dependancy management" with their systems than RPM or apt or anything else.
Here's what SHOULD happen.
1) We create a standard based on something that no one uses on linux right now, namely the Sys V package tools (like Solaris). It becomes a recommendation (not a required inclusion), but then we also stipulate that IF a package manager is bundled, it can't be certified LFS-compliant unless...
2) We ensure that an LFS compliant package manager can do everything those tools do, AND, the provide the legacy interface so that Solaris admins can still hack it.
3) We provide a convienent set of extensions to the package management tools that address certain oft-sited shortcomings. The biggest would be automatic dependancy analysis and a way to fetch the required patches or missing components. Also it would be nice to have a way to "force" things that wouldn't normally be allowed, and a way to remember that they were forced.
4) (Optional?) Force the package managers to use a common format for storing installed packages, etc. so they can be swapped out without fear of losing the package information. Perhaps not the entire backend, but enough to ensure the Sys V package interface is unpurturbed by the change behind the scenes.
With a recommendation, we can be sure that a package manager, if available, will function consistently across the various package management systems.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Nah, they just don't want to blow their load all at once. That's why the first one was funny and this one was kinda stupid. They will get much funnier as they go along.
Just kidding, April Fools!
If I made you look up the word 'genteel', mod me up - you learned a new word today!
I am not a Linux guru. I am not a complete newbie either. I have been running RH 8.0 for a number of months and so far my complaints center on no AA fonts and a firewire CD-RW that doesn't work.
Please tell me what is so bad about RPM's versus other package management systems. Why do people hate it so bad? What am I missing by using mostly RPMs? (I have done standard makefile builds before)
It seems to me that if someone could create a package management system that could read packages in all their forms and resolve any underlying dependencies then you would have one heck of a product.
It's spreading to other sites now too, the whole CPAN/Matt's archive thing did give me a bit of a scare, course it didn't help that they did it a whole day early (for me anyway, don't know what time zone they are in)
sic transit gloria mundi
RedHat announced today that they will be abandoning the RPM format in favor of .deb. One RedHat source who asked to remain anonymous called RPM "the biggest support nightmare I have ever seen. Why, compiling software is so much easier." ;-)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Or for that matter, how about including normal icons in the 'Slashdot tape' to the right of the Slashdot logo but using the 'Laugh. It's funny' humor icons in the main body of the front page?
I mean, some stupid CIO could easily be fed these stories as facts. I know it's their fault for buying stupid shit, but hey, let's be a little more considerate, please?
I have a much better April fool's joke: "My gentoo installation finished in under 4 hours on my Pentium 400."
Hell, "My gentoo installation finished in a weekend" would've been just as funny!But just to reassure all the Real Men and Real Women out there... the BSD systems will not attempt to conform to the LSB by adopting RPM ;-)
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The story over at fark.com that Montana is getting a sales tax!!!
RTFA
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Most of these April Fools posts will be because the /. moderators were taken themselves. Given the number of dups I doubt they even think about it at all.
I always wondered if one could make a .src.rpm based disro. For all those people that want special optimizations would get their few extra %'s of speed.
.src.rpm based distro would be useful is for non-x86 based systems.
.spec files.
Another reason a
I don't see why this would be very hard to put together. Maybe people would finally work together to build proper 3rd party
BTW, I just discovered http://www.jpackage.org/. It's a web site that provides a apt-get rpm repository for java programs.
And then there's those of us for whom it's late afternoon and were expecting AF jokes over 12 hours ago.
Posted by timothy on Monday March 31, @08:33PM
from the after-all-rpm-is-better dept.
I'll let you know when it gets here.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Whenever I see an April Fool's Joke on Slashdot, it reminds me of the infamous Perl/Python merger that was to be called Parrot.
If I live to be a million years old, I will never forget a friend in the dorms walking in to my room as my roommate and I were having a good laugh about the Parrot gag. He proceeded to tell us about the revolution in scripting that was going to occur by the merging of the two (I don't think he programmed in either language), and when I tried to interject a "Dude, I think it was an April Fool's Joke" he cut me off and made little motions with his hands like this:
"Perl!" (waved one hand)
"Python!" (waves other hand)
"Parrot!" (Put both hands together to indicate the merging of the two)
My roommate laughed until we cried, and the thought of it still cracks me up today.
My blog
You don't expect this type of shit at 1:00 am. That's what I get for browsing so late (apparently, so early :)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Dear Editors,
.... er..... I think I got the wrong forum.....
:-) With a Game Boy Advance SP - I know I will :-)
Thank you for you kind presents this year, they were certainly an improvement so far on last year - the stories, even though splitting my sides, were not that great as it was not really all that subtle. But I want to say that I am impressed how subtle you have been with this present, thank you! I would never have even guessed that this was a fake! How stupid I felt when I realised that it was!
One of the great things about pratical jokes on April Fools is their comedy timing [you couldn't get it wrong with the time being restricted to a lowly 12 hours] but also their shere subtlty.
Once again I thank you
[Here comes the nice bit]
Have a nice day everyone
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
...so we can point at him an laugh ;-)
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Normally they send the gentoo weekly newsletter on mondays, I was actually wondering where it was yesterday.
They must have waited for an extra in order to tell the blisfull news.
*ducks for cover*
i just about took a hammer to my harddrive. very funny
this is just evil to do, April fools sucks.
i read the title and about flew off the handle uintil about 3 seconds later when i realized it was april fools. PURE EVIL!!
that phrase has seldom been so relevant! My God, there are some evil people in the Gentoo team...
Meep.
Portage does have a binary package format. It might be interesting if pkg was replaced by rpm while keeping the portage ebuilds tree.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I'm sorry, but even though I use an RPM based distro (SuSE), I can't stand the RPM tools. Why can't they use something much nicer, like the DEB tools. I'd kill for a version of apt-get for SuSE, but nope, I've gotta go through their YaST software to get updates. Icky stuff. Go with the Debian Package Manager, nicer and more friendly.
I can't see why Gentoo has to change to using RPM. The reason I don't like using Redhat or SuSE and have always been using Slackware is partly because of the RPM packaging. In 2002 I switched to using Gentoo (Slackware made me used to compiling ;-) , but now, I have a strange feeling...
42 + 1 = 42
The only thing worse is www.tomshardware.com
My only wish is that there were moderation choices for "Gullible" and "Funny As All Hell."
monkeys weren't flying out of my butt.
Can I be the first to call April fools
No.
Suck figs.
It's just like the Slashdot editors to post something that was meant for release on April 1 on March 31, thereby ruining the joke.
Sort of like when they jump the gun and do a "FreeBSD version X is out" post prior to the official announcement by the FreeBSD team.
One of the nice things of April, 1st is able to spot the fake stories from the real ones. Unfortunately Gentoo makes no real sport from this anymore... (cf. the notes under their fake stories) D4mm1t!
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Neither this story nor this post were actually made in April. Hmmm...
Read jack phelps dot net
you can still have a sources build system and use rpm packages, just use checkinstall or use spec-stubs and installwatch for the file list.
nice word, not seen that before. Thanks.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Microsoft says it will be switching back to .COM memory executable format. "EXEs had lots of security issues in the past, so we think this will be more secure, but with less functionality" a Microsoft employee said.
------- The last Sig. got fired.
The RPM development team has just announced a bugfix for all of the circular dependency problems.
I almost had a freeking heart attack when I read that! For a second I thought all hope was lost for any good in this world.
-makoffee
I was just about to go up in flames, until I thought to look at the calendar. And I don't even use Gentoo - though I have given it some thought, it's just that I really like Slackware.
Oh, I get it. No one really cares about the LSB...
RPMs are not so bad. I prefer RPMs and TGZs over DEBs. It's an easy way to track, install, uninstall and update packages. Well, the latter isn't pretty easy to do, hehe :) but it's hard to update, and track packages that had been installed from tar.gz. However I guess that every distro has both its good and bad things.
n0dez
The newsletter actually says "Note: This is an April Fool's joke." I mean, if you have to explain the joke...
Is the biggest gripe with RPM the inability to automatically download packages? Is it because people have a big problem with the dependencies inherent to ? Many advocates of Debian's "package management" like it simply because it is easy to install packages from remote servers.
This is not the philosophy of package management. It is, however, an easy way to retrieve and install packages. "apt-get" is the utility by which packages are retrieved from other servers, cross-checked with a local database for dependency issues and then installed. If such functionality is desired by the end-user, there are utilities that also allow the automatic download and installation of a package and all of its dependencies.
RPM is a feature-robust, well-developed package management tool that allows developers to intricately control the methods by which applications are installed, configured, updated, and removed. When a spec file (the file that "rpmbuild" uses to make binary and source RPMs) is properly formatted and configured, package management (and dependencies) are a snap. It is an invaluable tool for a developer that wishes to target their package for the majority of Linux installations out in the community.
RPM has been chosen by quite a few mainstream distributions as well as being supported by third-party software distributors. Without custom modifications, RPM (and its source packages) can be easily configured and installed on a target distribution with little to no hassle. I have been using RPM for many years now and find it to be quite nice and user friendly. As with any software application, it takes a bit of time and training to feel comfortable using it.
Gentoo's decision to adopt RPM, in my opinion, is a good one - conforming to the LSB brings another distribution into compliance to make the end-user's experience a more consistent one with other mainstream distributions. This approach allows for users to "make the switch" from another popular distribution to Gentoo with relative ease. Gentoo also can continue to enhance portage without having to rely on their own custom package management tool - diverting time and effort into the portage system rather than the build/packaging process. Thus, Gentoo opens up to a established base of already-present packages (including their enhancement patches) to further better their own distribution.
Ayup
*weeps*
/. readers. Not only are we subjected to a day of really nasty jokes and heartattacks (Damn you, Timothy, for not waiting till midnight!), but we have to go a whole day without decent news.
/. reader. And I WANT MY DAMN NEWS! Get a life, boyz....let's try being more clever about it, hrm?
</RANT>
It's begun again. The annual April Fool's Day flogging of loyal
Clever would be to insert joke stories in between real stories. Interesting and amusing would be to sneak in things where you don't expect them, in the middle of normality. No one does something all out for AprFoo like declaring themselves gay for a day. They'll do it for a bit, then quit, because it's purile otherwise.
I'm a computer professional. I'm a loyal
Blog,Twitter
You're fired. Not only did you not get the first post, but you also misspelled a five letter word. Five letters - just like the number of days in the work week. God, I love being upper management.
Guess I'll visit the BSD merger story.
How unexpected.
I just about had a heart attack until I read the note.