Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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)
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.
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.
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
...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..."
hook, line and sinker.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
1. It's a joke. (Look at the calendar. Don't believe anything you read on slashdot in the next 24 hours).
..., get home from work exhausted the next day, look for that package, find a few rpms compiled for a different distro, architecture, gcc version, or rpm version, scream in disgust, and then switch to Debian or Gentoo.
2. You obviously know not of what you speak. RPMs are more complicated than Gentoo ebuilds or debian debs.
With Gentoo you type:
# emerge enlightenment
You don't have to know anything about C, C++, Python or even shell scripting. All you have to know is your architecture and the optimizations you want (and the detailed docs are very newbie friendly).
with debian type:
# apt-get install enlightenment
Either distro will then install E, X, and all required libs/programs.
Both distros have centralized package repositories (free of charge) that contain everything I've ever needed, tested for full compatibility.
With rpm, you find the package, download it, type the rpm command, get an error about libWhatever.X.Y.Z.so being required, spend hours figuring out what package has libWhatever.X.Y.Z.so, go to bed three hours late, because you were looking for the package,
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.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
well, it isn't so much RPM that sucks as a tool in itself as it is braindead package authors (well, it is kind of non-unixy in the small tool that does one thing kind of philosophy, rpm is a huge monolithic program). So you try to install lynx and find perl is a dependency. wha? ok, so you install perl. You don't really have space for it on this box, but hey, maybe it will come in handy. But the perl rpm says a dozen or so perl modules are dependencies. huh? Those damn things are optional, goddammit. But whatever. So perl is happy. Back to wget. Now it says it has to install index.html. WTF? A fucking homepage? That's a damn dependency? awright, let it continue, and now it bitches cause index.html is generated by python.
That's the problem with RPM systems. You want to install a text-only browser on a 486 and wind up installing 100 megs more vthan you wanted to.
Some software comes only in RPM packages, like Compaq's C compiler. Ever tried to install an rpm on a Slackware system? It complains that glibc, bin/sh and a kernel aren't installed. RPM is stupid.
I've patched my rpm to take --just-do-it-you-goddam-piece-of-shit as an argument, which sets the --force and --nodep bits.
...so we can point at him an laugh ;-)
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets