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Fedora Project to Help Revitalize RPM

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the breathing-life-back-in dept.

-=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."

2 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. You Have It All Wrong by eklitzke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have read through the (very few so far) messages in the new mailing list, and based on the discussion there as well as the similar discussions that have taken place in the past, I think that the general consensus is that users should not be using the rpm command line tool for package management. Rpm (the CLI tool, not the format) should be like dpkg in the Debian world -- a very low level tool for package management. If you want something user friendly to use at the command line, use yum, apt-rpm, yast, or whatever other high level tool floats your boat.

    In fact, to a large degree it is more important that better rpm bindings (especially for python) be written. This is how yum works -- it is able to do all of this using the python bindings, instead of calling the rpm tool itself. Calling rpm -i foo.rpm should really be a last resort option. (For those that are curious, yum already has a --localinstall option for doing this.)

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  2. Anti-FUD Post by pembo13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    1) RPM is not equivalent to APT , or Smart
    2) RPM is not responsible for _solving_ deps
    3) RPM is both a file format and a program to use the format
    4) RPM is _not_ a package manager
    5) RPM has little to do with how much you may love your Debian distro of choice (unless you made that choice solely on the file format of the packages used by your distro)
    6) The existence and use of RPM does not work against your distro of choice, and so there is no reason to fear/hate it

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