Buzzwords, marketingspeak, and/or other jargon

Buzzwords, marketingspeak, and/or other jargon

> But based on that document, conary seems to mostly solve problems found in
> the RPM world. As a typical desktop user, it's still not clear to me how
> conary would be better than emerge or apt.

Enabling people to modify and customize the software components in a Linux based distribution was is of the major design goals for Conary. dpkg, rpm, portage, etc. don't give you the facility to do distributed development of an entire Linux-base distribution.

I was talking to a help desk staffer after my Conary presentation at TruLUG last night. He was asking why we didn't have Conary three years ago when the organization was deploying Red Hat Linux 7.3 to non-technical desktop users. They added StarOffice as the office suite, but integrating it into the distribution was extremely difficult. They wanted to modify the mailcap package so that StarOffice would automatically be used to open .doc files downloaded in Netscape. They ended up creating their own "ourcompany-mailcap" package because there wasn't a way to maintain that local modification to the mailcap package.

With Conary, the company would be able to create a special type of branch of the mailcap package. We call these branches "shadows". They would be able to make their local modifications on that shadow, which could be stored on a local Conary repository. Shadows keep track of the ancestry of the package, which allows you to easily merge in changes that happen "upstream" of the shadow.

Conary brings a paradigm shift in how software is managed on Linux systems, and how Linux distributions are built and customized. It takes a bit of time to see the whole system when you're looking at it from a "how is it better than APT, YUM or Portage" perspective.