Package Manager [LWN.net]

Package Manager

Posted Jul 5, 2006 15:25 UTC (Wed) by brugolsky (subscriber, #28)
In reply to: Package Manager by warmcat1
Parent article: Interview: Jim Gettys (Part II)

IMHO, RPM (and dpkg) have outlived their usefulness. Max Spevack, chairman of the Fedora Board, said in this interview that he is interested in shifting the Fedora Project from RPM to a distributed version control system -- i.e., Conary, or something like it. Conary offers all of the benefits of distributed version control, including simple incremental updates via compressed deltas, separation and unification of policy (pre/post-install scripts and triggers) from the software artefacts themselves, as well as a packaging model that utilizes inheritance to relentlessly factor the software build process. It will be a lot of work to convert RPM spec files to Conary recipes, but worth the effort.

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Package Manager

Posted Jul 5, 2006 20:24 UTC (Wed) by warmcat1 (guest, #31975) [Link]

Thanks for the information... there's a link in the interview to this overview of Conary:

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/30/210216

I don't know that the existing packaging technologies have generally "outlived their usefulness", because for my little set of usage cases (including embedded) RPM is really nice. On a RHEL sort of view I can see that some of the Conary things would be interesting, and in turn that makes it interesting for Fedora, so maybe it will come to pass.

For the OLPC, if the sticking point with having a packaging system at all is the storage footprint, it seems from the descriptions of Conary that problem is getting bigger not smaller in that direction. So it continues to seem to me RPM or some RPM-lite would be a good thing there.

Package Manager

Posted Jul 5, 2006 20:54 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Looks like Max Spevack did not say that.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/200...

Package Manager

Posted Jul 5, 2006 22:45 UTC (Wed) by brugolsky (subscriber, #28) [Link]

Well that's unfortunate; I had smiled broadly when I read the Newsforge story. Thanks for setting the facts straight. I wish I had the time to go through Core/Extras/RPMforge, etc., and figure out how much effort is really required to switch packaging systems.