gnuLinEx 2004 Launched (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

There's that word "componentized" again...

Posted Nov 16, 2004 17:45 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

Could someone please explain what is so revolutionary about Ian's "componentization"? I've read descriptions of it and I have never been able to figure out how it differes from the package management done by pretty much every other distro. The article says that you can add MySQL support without having to worry about thousands of packages. Wow.

rpm -ivh mysql-server mysql

or replace Gnome with KDE. This is admittedly slightly more involved from the command line, but easily done with just a few mouse clicks in, e.g., Fedora's "Add/Remove Applications" utility. (I use Fedora as an example only because I am most familiar with it.)

I'm not criticizing the concept. I just feel like I'm missing something fundamental about this. What is it?

I'll try to help you.

Posted Nov 16, 2004 18:04 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

The big problem -- bigger still with Debian and it's 14000+ sid packages -- is that if you want a *release* version of something, then you have to keep an old version, for quite some time, and you generally can not mix and match versions of something, unless a source distro is in use.

Trying to be more clear, if I want to use the solid apache/kernel2.4 combo from woody, but I want to use the cutting-edge GNOME 2.8 from experimental, I can't, at least not without a lot of hassle. In Ian's componentized, the components can be -- and frequently will be -- released separately.

This is exactly my case: as of today, I run a machine that is an iptables router/firewall, a zope server, and a desktop machine at the same time. If I use woody, I can't install official zope/plone packages, and I am stuck with kde2.

I'll try to help you.

Posted Nov 16, 2004 19:27 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

Thank you for the reply. I get the impression then, that the goals are perhaps more ambitious than I had thought. They want to make it possible to drop any version of any component into any exitsting system without dependency issues, without resorting to going source based, and in a way that is more transparent to the administrator than using SRPMs (which, of course, are source based). This idea had not even occurred to me because I haven't the foggiest idea how one would get around the library version dependency issues.

Or am I still off the mark? Is this a plan to allow incremental package version updates to Debian Stable (I guess that should be Progeny Stable)? If so, I thought that apt-get was capable of handling this. (I've read many times that apt-get blurs the distinction between releases.) So is a componentized model targeted to providing stabilized and approved debian-testing packages to the base distro? This would combine the advantages of a rock solid Debian Stable, with the advantages of Debian Testing, but only the packages you needed the latest versions of would be somewhat less tested than the base distro.

As I have been typing this, I have been getting the odd feeling that it could be construed as a troll of sorts. Truly, it is not. So please make allowances for my RedHat/Fedora centricity.