Packaging summit [LWN.net]

Packaging summit

Posted Oct 9, 2009 9:17 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Packaging summit by nevyn
Parent article: A report from the RPM summit

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.

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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