LWN.net Logo

Revisiting RPM Package Management

Revisiting RPM Package Management

Posted Sep 18, 2003 10:28 UTC (Thu) by leandro (guest, #1460)
In reply to: Revisiting RPM Package Management by vblum
Parent article: Revisiting RPM Package Management

> what exactly does all other distro's dependency resolution provide that SuSE's yast2 does not?

Freedom. Yast is proprietary.


(Log in to post comments)

Revisiting RPM Package Management

Posted Sep 18, 2003 11:30 UTC (Thu) by RobDavies (guest, #9930) [Link]

YaST license only fails the OSI Open Source definition, because it does
not permit re-distribution for a fee. Full source is provided and
modifications are permitted, so simply labelling it 'proprietary' is an
over-simplification.

Revisiting RPM Package Management

Posted Sep 18, 2003 18:25 UTC (Thu) by vblum (subscriber, #1151) [Link]

> Freedom. Yast is proprietary.

1) you are right, Freedom would be nice. Why? It is a key mistake of "the Linux industry" to not settle on a common installation / sysadmin interface / GUI framework. This repeats the fragmentation of unix (if you extrapolate a few years ahead). It's extremely annoying that you have to relearn all that stuff for every single new distribution. This will ultimately scare users back to Windows (one distributor = relative consistency; monopolies are great for that).

OSDL might be the place to settle that issue; it may seem trivial, but having to administer RH, SuSE at the same time is really annoying due to lack of consistency between them in little things.

2) Freedom is not a requirement for a working package management system, though - which is the topic of the article. SuSE does have that, as far as end users are concerned.

cheers

V.

Revisiting RPM Package Management

Posted Jan 6, 2004 17:49 UTC (Tue) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

> Freedom is not a requirement for a working package management system, though - which is the topic of the article. SuSE does have that, as far as end users are concerned.

For me and for thousands other freedom is a requirement. Just because one's an end user it doesn't mean one abdicates from freedom.

Copyright © 2008, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds