Interesting post

Interesting post

Posted Nov 7, 2006 16:03 UTC (Tue) by scottt (subscriber, #5028)
In reply to: Structural impediments by brugolsky
Parent article: Big decisions loom for Fedora

I summarized the problems you raised as follows:

1. update download size is large since Fedora does not use delta RPMs esp. font langpack and i18n packages
2. RPM and prelink make it hard to maintain identical program binaries for multiple hard linked chroot environments or disk images
3. The spec file format that control RPM building is a terrible macro language. The same scriptlets gets copy-and-pasted into many packages and there's no way for the sysadmin to replace the scripts system wide.
4. maintaining local packages that apply custom patches and pass different compile time options to configure should be easier.
5. network configuration: secondary IP addresses, policy routing, packet marking and filtering, and traffic control and QoS.
6. LVM snapshots are slow.

I agree with most of your comments.

For problem 1, my understanding is that the Fedora project would not use an update system with that only downloads binary deltas like firefox's because their mirrors would not like to run any custom server programs.

I agree that the spec language sucks whole heartedly. Here's an example, bug 159792 . Dave Jones wanted %patch to use a "fuzzy level" switch of "-F1". Costomizing the behavior of "patch" and "configure" should be easy. Then there's the one that rpmbuild expands macros even in the changelog section of the spec file.

I believe conary has a way to deal with the cut-and-paste scriptlet problem by tagging a GNU info file or gconf spec file as such and providing a way for the sysadmin to specify the scripts to install them.

Prelink provides valuable address space randomization protection for most systems and I think Fedora is right to have it on by default.

For maintaining custom packages, there's the additional problem of making sure your package doesn't get overrided by anything that comes from the update repository.

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