Package Version Control [LWN.net]

Package Version Control

Posted Apr 15, 2005 3:28 UTC (Fri) by miallen (guest, #10195)
Parent article: Fedora leaves a vast legacy

Are the Fedora 2, 3, 4, or whatever packages really that different? Couldn't version control be applied in such a way that fixing a bug in 4 can be automatically applied to 3, 2, etc? It seems silly to have to duplicate so much work. In fact it would be nice if there was a single repository of "common" packages for all distros. Each distro could elect to inherit specific patches or branch at the file level. Of course I doubt such a version control system exists.

Also, I'm personally a little urq'd that there's no distro that lasts long enough to get any freakn' work done on it. This Fedora legacy thing should be given higher priority IMHO. I'm still running RH 7.3 and my firebird install is holier than IE 4 at this point. Unfortunately I didn't learn of Fedora legacy until long after upgrading with many many .src.rpms so I think it's a little late to use it.

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Package Version Control

Posted Apr 15, 2005 6:43 UTC (Fri) by khim (guest, #9252) [Link]

Are the Fedora 2, 3, 4, or whatever packages really that different?

Yes, it's that different.

Couldn't version control be applied in such a way that fixing a bug in 4 can be automatically applied to 3, 2, etc?

No. You need to build new binary packages for all configurations and test them.

Also, I'm personally a little urq'd that there's no distro that lasts long enough to get any freakn' work done on it.

There is. It's called RHEL (not clones - clones tend to track only last version of RHEL).

In fact I think it's the only sane way to have "distro that lasts long enough to get any freakn' work done on it": either you have distro in constant upgrade state (like Gentoo) or you need to pay someone. It's quite simple actually: people dislike to mess with old packages for free. Even Debian is not able to find enough volunteers (thus mozilla in latest release had known security holes on release day!).

Package Version Control

Posted Apr 16, 2005 0:51 UTC (Sat) by miallen (guest, #10195) [Link]

Couldn't version control be applied in such a way that fixing a bug in 4 can be automatically applied to 3, 2, etc?

No. You need to build new binary packages for all configurations and test them.

I didn't mean to suggest using a VCS for storing binaries. How many distros actually modify the source of cURL, zlib, python, etc? Sure some things like Samba, bind, and apache are tweeked to integrate with the distro's management tools but there are many packages that are just installed by default without any modification. Upgrading these packages is simply a matter of applying a patch, setting the config flags, and rebuilding the package with appropriate dependencies. It's amazing to me that whenever there's a bug in zlib that each distro has to patch it independantly.