A possible change of direction for Foresight Linux [LWN.net]

A possible change of direction for Foresight Linux

Posted Aug 15, 2009 18:26 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
In reply to: A possible change of direction for Foresight Linux by drag
Parent article: A possible change of direction for Foresight Linux

Given that they're using RPM packages, I find it difficult to see how conary could better manage that information: sure, it does the "revision system" thing, but RPMs contains scripts and other stuff that make them a bit more complicated than that.

I'm sure that using conary would mean you could do things like roll back updates and stuff, but I'm equally sure that the impedance mis-match between rpm and conary would cause other stuff to screw up.

For the sake of a slightly different package management system, it seems like an awful lot of effort when the easier path is just to base on Fedora.

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A possible change of direction for Foresight Linux

Posted Aug 15, 2009 18:45 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

From the article:

> Most of you know that rPath now provides multiple OS bases by importing existing OSes built with other technology into a Conary repository. We have automatically-updated imports of SLES 10 and SLES 11 (both available by subscription only), CentOS 5, and Scientific Linux 5. We have imported a version of Ubuntu Hardy as a functional proof of concept that we can improve based on customer demand. We have done some work on importing a few other OS variants, too. We do this with a tool that we can make available as Open Source so that Foresight is not dependent on rPath to maintain the import of another more frequently-updated OS as a base.

It seems they already know how to overcome the hurdles for paying customers.

rPath, as you are probably aware, is a decently successful company that specializes it producing "linux appliances' for lots of different sorts of customers. They do this by taking a base OS and introducing it into a revision control system so that they can tailor it to the specifications and release it as a 'vmware player' guest and other such things.

Been around for a while now.