Slashdot Mirror
Fedora Project to Help Revitalize RPM
-=Moridin=- writes "The Fedora Project has announced plans to revitalize RPM, the package manager used by many Linux distros. According to the announcement, 'Job #1 is to take the current RPM codebase and clean it up, and in doing so work with all the other people and groups who rely on RPM to build a first-rate upstream project.' For more information, see the the RPM web site and the new wiki-based RPM FAQ. The issue of RPM's upstream development has been a thorny issue ever since Jeff Johnson, the original maintainer of RPM, left Red Hat."
That would be the Redhat Package Manager, right?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yum and others handles repositories and dependency solving.
apt and rpm don't compete - they are not even similar in purpose - each fill a different role and are cooperative ratehr than competative.
.deb files and dpkg?
.debs a slightly better package structure/file structure than rpms, and dpkg a more flexible and easier to use (getting both is quite an achievement I think) command line.
.deb system as they very rarely run somehting like dpkg -i gcc-4.1.deb - usually they will type apt-get install build-essentials or apt-get install gcc and it will "just work" (or they will use dselect but thats another topic)
.deb files via apt (and lets face it - if you are sing a distro with .deb you are almost certainly using apt or dselect). This perception causes the view that rpm is crap and .deb/dpkg is far superior. The real problem is though not the package management tool at all. Its the repository management policy, something that debian and debian based projects has had right for a long time.
In fact apt can work quite well with rpms (the apt for rpm project springs to mind)
Maybe you are confusing the issue with
Personally I find
However those are personal preference and while not quite as contentious as emacs vs vi I'm sure they won't be solved any time soon.
You are right to bring up apt though - its apt that makes distros like ubuntu and debian shine. Or more importabltly its the repository organisation and discipline that sits behind apt. Without this organisation server side, the package files clearly listing each package which dependancies and conflicts, then the system is all but meaningless, and thats where apt for rpm has fallen down (not that it doesn't work, I've used it with several rpm respositories, its not bad but several times I've had to hand resolve large messy conflicts, I've had to do that on debian true, but only when doing really messy mixtures of sid sarge and woody all on one box during times of serious upheaval - gnome 1.4 to gnome 2 springs to mind)
Getting rpm and apt to run better together is not really about code changes or design changes to either apt or rpm (or the existing apt for rpm software). Its about making good rpm respositories and the package files that go with them - that would be a huge improvement for starters.
The main fustration people feel with rpm is dependancy resolving, being able to type rpm -i gcc-4.1.rpm and having it just work would be nice. People don't associate the same problem with the
I think that is what really colours peoples perceptions. They feel pain frequently when they use rpm (I know I do). They don't feel pain when using
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
I am not a Linux user, but I am a software developer, and it seems to me, that ALL the distros could benefit from a universal package manager, that was compatible with all the major package types?
Or do I completely mis-understand how things work under linux ?
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
Worth to mention that apt now deprecated in favor of aptitude. Aptitude marks packages installed as part of dependency resolution and when you later remove the installed software, it would also remove all automatically installed packages.
+100. yum is dumbest and slowest tool I have ever seen. Especially when people try to pitch it against apt-get. And aptitude is ages ahead of any package management RedHat ever implemented.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
No, it's app packager that still think in term of "packaging format" that should die.
What are you thinking ? That because a packager did pack a "RPM" then it surely going to work on any RPM-based distro ?
You're plain wrong. If it happens to work that way in the DEB-world (one single DEB good for most cases) it has nothing to do with DEB being a supperior format or whatever. It's just that DEB happens to be the native format for Debian and most DEB-using distros happen to be debian customized variants with a different name.
Packages are only a practical way of storing together the files, the special install scripts and the dependencies needed to install an application. Anyone is mostly as good as any other of them (and thanks to some facility like "alien", may be substituted freely), with maybe the exception of Slackware's tgz (less informations in there).
What package manager have to think about isn't the package format in itself. They have to think about the distribution which they are targeting. Each distribution out there, even if it uses a common packager, is a different mix of libraries and application versions.
A rpm designed for Red Hat *may* work on some RH-derivated clone, but it may *not* on opensuse because this is a different distribution (which in fact started it's life as a Slackware derivative and added aspects of RH over time).
If RPM get deprecated and replaced by DEB in most distros that currently use it, this won't make the packager's task less difficult. They'll be only using DEBs, but they'll still have to build a different DEB for each different distribution familiy.
Most problems that people are complaining about will still be here : YaST will still be as slow as usual, some badly behaved package managing systems will still break often, and users who didn't download the correct package will still encounter dependency hell.
In fact, more confusion is likely to happen among inexperienced users : "But I did download the DEB, my system is DEB-based, why doesn't it work ? - Yeah but did you download the Debian-specific or the RH-specific DEB ? - What do you men ? It's all DEBs it's all the same stuff... - (Sigh)"
The best way to avoid dependency problems isn't switching the package format, but either :
- using static and/or libraries included binary packages (like OpenOffice) and you're sure everything is included in the package. But then you loose all advantages of system-wide updates or upgrades (*).
- using a package reporitory that contains RPM specifically designed for YOUR distribution (get rpms for your openSUSE from Packman instead of some random site). Which is the method I recommand the most.
----
(*) - What I mean is that is some library, like ffmpeg has newer ability (like better capability at handling latest Microsoft WMV format), on a system that uses system dynamic libraries (like say VLC installed from Packman on a suse Linux), you immediately take advantage of it. On a system were every application has it's own set of libraries (like OS/X or GoboLinux or a package with all libs inside), you'll have to wait until next release to take advantage of it.
Same for security : when a security flaw was found in "libtiff", under Linux, you have only to download its patch and all your graphics applications are secure again. When WMF flaw was found on Windows (were mostly each application has its own copy of WMF routines), you had to check each application and patch it (at least microsoft designed a tool to simplify the process).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]