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Packaging summitPackaging summitPosted Oct 8, 2009 20:02 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: Packaging summit by kragil Parent article: A report from the RPM summit
Won't happen, unless we all switch to something like Nix (package manager, not LWN subscriber :) ).
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Packaging summit Posted Oct 8, 2009 22:26 UTC (Thu) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]
I've yet to see someone developing a significantly used package management system (Eg. rpm/dpkg/yum/apt/zypp/smart/etc.) that thinks autopackage, Nix or zero-install is going to work.
Dito. for anyone in rel-eng at a large distribution (Eg. Debian, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, etc.)
I've yet to see autopackage, Nix or zero-install distribute a significant number of used packages ... and thus. show that they can work at anything above toy examples.
Feel free to get back to me when one of the above is true.
Packaging summit Posted Oct 9, 2009 9:17 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
Have you looked at Conary? It's by the original rpm developer, so it might have a better chance than most of dealing with the real-world problems that come up.
Packaging summit Posted Oct 9, 2009 11:21 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
Thanks for mentioning Conary. So the problem is not getting better: new package formats getting added :-)
Are all Conary-based distributions compatible with each other?
(Conary was invented to solve a different problem. It is well-suited for solving it. But Conary won't bring us world peace. Nor would it unify all distributions)
Packaging summit Posted Oct 9, 2009 15:41 UTC (Fri) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]
Conary is/was interesting. I had high hopes for it when it was released, but that was years ago now. Whether it was the concept wasn't as great as I thought or just that rPath didn't have the resources to make it I don't know.
But I did not see Conary as the same as Nix/zero-install (and still don't) because to me the idea behind rPath was that you could manage a largish number of "small" changes well (ie. 1,000 customers with a small number of patches each[1]), that package creation might be easier than anything else, and of course the rollback/sub-set features (although years later others are getting there).
Nix/zero-install/etc. seem to me to be based on the idea that you can have large changes within a distro. and it still work. And I'll bet against that everyday, and twice on Sundays.
[1] http://illiterat.livejournal.com/3568.html
Packaging summit Posted Oct 9, 2009 9:11 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Despite my name I don't see how Nix would help much with alien-package installation either. You would still have policy differences between installed packages, and while shared library naming might matter a bit less, dlopen()ed pathnames are still seriously important, unless you think KDE will like having several copies of its libraries and their state in a single process's address space at the same time (I tried it, and the best scenario is a coredump).
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