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URPMI For Fedora Core 2
Jaroslaw Zachwieja writes "Stefan van der Eijk, the autor of Slbd - automated tool to rebuild distributions to different architectures/processors in a sanitized environment, has published set of RPMS of URPMI for Fedora Core 2. The only usage difference is that it uses hdlist instead of compressed hdlist.cz known from Mandrake. Are we one step further towards Cross-distro RPMS?"
RPMs can be considered the "Install Shield" of Linux. Yes compiling from source is easy and can be better...but when was the last time you compiled something like KDE or Gnome or even OpenOffice.org from source?
Last time I compiled just the kde-base it took over 12 hours. When a RPM would do the trick in less then 5 minutes. Sure, you may lose some of your precious 'performance tweaks' but you didn't have to wait a day to use it!
BTW, I use Gentoo and love it so I'm not some corporate brainwashed RPM troll. But I can see the benifits of RPMs in a more 'commercial' environment.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
I was introduced to chroots not to long ago and this made my life a little more simple. Just create a small partition of your disk, install a distribution there, don't update the boot partition and move the new dist to a directory on your system. Then just cd into that dir and chroot. Whammo, instant mandrake/suse/redhat/fedora. =)
Atleast for devel purposes.
I don't know much about windows but I imagine that this is one thing that they've managed to nail down. Something created on XP have a fair chance of running on other windows. Or am I misinformed?
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
*blinks*
.....
I think I speak for all long term windows users here when I say.... Huh?
I've only got the faintest idea what this article is going on about, but since I'm a Fedora user with a gripe about installing software on linux, I'll brashly comment anyway.
RPM is good. I love RPM. I can't imagine where I'd be without that lovely self contained, self extracting package that Just Works(TM). Of course sometimes it dosen't Just Work, like when it was built for a different distro, which is very annoying.
Still, it's either that or configure,make,make install or a big gcc -lSDL - lSDL_image -lGLU etc..... for about 50 files. And while these things aren't rocket science, not having a double click to install makes my Linux life all the harder. I'm too long in the windows universe perhaps, but I still like RPM. Now if only it had a GUI.
But on the other hand, will self installers lead us down the path of mindless users, spyware and spam boxes with
embedded linux(the horror)!!! Do we tread the path of usability at our peril?
P.S.
What's hdlist.
May the Maths Be with you!
This worries me a bit. I personally cannot endorse the use of the RPM system globally until it more stringently ensures package validity.
The RPM system has virtually no assurance of GPG key identification. Basically, if a mirror (or any website that serves RPMs) pushes out malicious RPMs, the GPG check by the RPM installer gives NO warning if the RPM isn't encoded at all, and only a passing warning if it doesn't match the RH public key.
This is a potentially huge hole in all RPM based distros, as was demonstrated to me recently by a manipulated RH RPM which, when installed, deleted the iptables rules file and various other things. Yet, the RPM system barely complained about the GPG mismatch and installed anyway (without telling what it did either).
If we're moving toward cross-distro RPM system, it is multiplying the potential problem. I think this needs to be addressed before such a system is adopted by other distros.
For one,yum is *much*, *much* slower than urpmi at dependency resolution, second, I don't think yum supports retreiving packages via ssh/rsync, and I am sure there are others.