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Moblin and Maemo to mergeMoblin and Maemo to mergePosted Feb 15, 2010 18:19 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: Moblin and Maemo to merge by drag Parent article: Moblin and Maemo to merge
For the record, LSB does not mandate RPM as the base package installation tool of a compliant system. It just says the system must be able to install packages that third-party vendors provide in RPM format, which is a completely different thing. Also it is not necessary to interact with dpkg as it installs packages. This can be avoided, e.g., by »pre-seeding« Debconf with the answers to the questions it would otherwise ask the user. Finally, one must keep in mind that this sort of thing is rarely if ever decided solely based on the technical merits of the solutions involved. Instead it is safe to assume that when the Moblin and Maemo guys sat down to figure out how to merge their systems, they had to adopt parts of both just to keep everyone happy. (After all, everyone had been sinking so much work into their stuff, it would have been a pity to throw one away completely.) One might conjecture, for example, that the Maemo guys got to hang on to Qt as the main GUI toolkit while the Moblin guys got to hang on to Fedora as the base distribution, so both parties could save face and meet in the middle :^)
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Moblin and Maemo to merge Posted Feb 15, 2010 19:09 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] This can be avoided, e.g., by »pre-seeding« Debconf with the answers to the questions it would otherwise ask the user.Yeah. That is what I said. You need to know the answers and have a way to pre-configure them. (to the OP) And sure Dkpg can be configured to ignore all but the most critical questions, but it still does not really change the fundamental nature of the beast. And they were asking about a technical advantage and this is certainly one of them. Finally, one must keep in mind that this sort of thing is rarely if ever decided solely based on the technical merits of the solutions involved. Instead it is safe to assume that when the Moblin and Maemo guys sat down to figure out how to merge their systems, they had to adopt parts of both just to keep everyone happy. Moblin is a part of Linuxfoundation.org. One would hope that they would try to keep their standards compliant with one another. That seems to be important. It is not so much a distribution as it is a project to bring uniformity to Intel-based mobile Linux systems. With the addition of Maemo now they are trying to get everything cross- platform. Whether or not Dpkg or RPM is superior to one another is really very irrelevant.
Moblin and Maemo to merge Posted Feb 15, 2010 20:56 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Its instructive to go back to the commentary made when Moblin switched to rpm when they opened up moblin v2 development. Dirk Hohndel specifically commented on the availability of the licensing header tag fields in the rpm format as a reason for the change. The stated reasons are boring, pragmatic, build system specific technical reasons related to the type of build environment desired when they were restructuring for moblinv2.
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I do find it fascinating though that the Moblin/MeeGo choice of RPM/DEB is still contentious, but the Google move from Deb to using Gentoo's portage system for ChromeOS development hasn't generated as much...passion...from the peanut gallery.
Considering the sort of use specific device targets MeeGo is being designed for.. i would have thought that either conary or portage would have been the most, apt, infrastructure technology for the same reasons that Google has moved on to using portage.
-jef
Moblin and Maemo to merge Posted Feb 15, 2010 21:46 UTC (Mon) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
> I do find it fascinating though that the Moblin/MeeGo choice of RPM/DEB is still contentious,
> but the Google move from Deb to using Gentoo's portage system for ChromeOS development > hasn't generated as much...passion...from the peanut gallery.
I suspect a lot more people use and care about Moblin than ChromeOS. No point in getting
Moblin and Maemo to merge Posted Feb 15, 2010 23:23 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Dirk Hohndel specifically commented on the availability of the licensing header tag fields in the rpm format as a reason for the change. This is a bit of a straw man considering that it would be trivial to add the same sort of information to a .deb package. You might not actually even need a »License:« header for it; a »licensed::gpl« (or whatever) entry in the »Tag:« header would probably be sufficient already. Dirk Hohndel is too smart to get away with something like this. The reason why Debian doesn't do this already is that for Debian GNU/Linux itself, it isn't necessary to put that sort of information in the package file header; the distribution places everything that is free (according to Debian's definition of »free«, the DFSG) in the »main« part of the distribution while everything that does not meet the DFSG either directly or by association goes to »non-free« or »contrib«, respectively. There is no apparent need to specify the licensing of a package in more detail unless you want to get anal-retentive about BSD vs. GPL licensing or some such; as far as Debian GNU/Linux is concerned, everything in »main« is »free enough«. In Debian packages, more detailed licensing information is provided in the mandatory »copyright« file, and indeed for a majority of packages a »License:« header could probably be populated automatically from the content of the »copyright« file. Of course, having an explicit »License:« header in Debian packages would make a lot of sense in the greater scheme of things, and it seems such a straightforward thing to add that it could hardly be considered a deal-breaker. In fact I find it hard to believe that that was supposed to be the real reason for the switch, but then again what do I know?
Moblin and Maemo to merge Posted Feb 16, 2010 1:14 UTC (Tue) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link] There is no apparent need to specify the licensing of a package in more detail unless you want to get anal-retentive about BSD vs. GPL licensing or some suchI would argue that the case of GPLv3 software in particular shows the need for finer granularity; it's quite possible now to have two chunks of code that are each DFSG-free, but that may not be linked together. That's a useful thing to be able to detect programmatically.
Moblin and Maemo to merge Posted Feb 16, 2010 5:58 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
Indeed. See the recent thread [1] where a debian developer noticed that some GPL'd software was
inadvertently being linked against OpenSSL (gpl-incompatible!).
There is a proposal for Debian to make the debian/copyright files be machine readable for just this
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/01/msg00354.html
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