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Rock Linux 2.0 released
Rock Linux has
announced the released of ROCK Linux 2.0 (Codename: Rafaella).
"Instead of .tar.bz2 the newly invented .gem package format is used -
so now ROCK Linux features dependency resolution during the installation as
well as additional meta-data for the end-user."
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Rock Linux 2.0 released Posted Mar 10, 2004 2:10 UTC (Wed) by gavino (guest, #16214) [Link] maybe they should call it .yapf Yet Another Package Format!It has to be asked - what can gem do that rpm and deb cannot?
Rock Linux 2.0 released Posted Mar 10, 2004 3:08 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] Prevent people from trying to install rpms or debs from some other incompatible distribution, then complain when things don't work or break.It has worked pretty well for Debian.
Rock Linux 2.0 released Posted Mar 10, 2004 7:55 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link] Debian predates Red Hat, so that would be the other way around. Why RedHat chose to make an (at the time) inferior package format has always been a mystery to me. Perhaps it is as you say, what marketing would call "brand recognition".
Rock Linux 2.0 released Posted Mar 10, 2004 10:27 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] Maybe I was a bit provocative, but it wasn't intended as a troll.All the .deb using distros have similar or identical packaging policies, so you just don't see the same sorts of problems as happen with RPM based distros (eg. when a new user tries to install a SuSE package on Mandrake and things fail because packages are named differently or split differently). If mutually incompatible package collections existed for the .deb format, people would have similar problems with those systems. Of course, I can't prove this because there incompatible package collections don't exist (at least, not the level of incompatibility seen between RPM based distros). By inventing another packaging format, Rock Linux also side steps this problem.
deb vs. rpm vs. gem Posted Mar 10, 2004 8:45 UTC (Wed) by stuart (subscriber, #623) [Link] Yes I do find your post a bit offensive. There are good technical reasons to use deb instead of rpm, at least historically. Maybe rpm is now closer to not going titsup.com regularly.Choice is a good thing thought....right?
deb vs. rpm vs. gem Posted Mar 10, 2004 10:35 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] I wasn't focusing on technical aspects of the different packaging formats. Instead, whether there are incompatible package collections available or not.If you find a .deb on the internet, it will almost definitely work with Debian (of some version). The dependencies will point at package names that exist in Debian (rather than some other .deb based distro that has chosen a different set of package names). If you find a .gem package on the internet now, it is almost definitely for Rock Linux. The same is not true for RPM packages due to the number of RPM based distributions. So having a different packaging format does have its advantages. At the same time, the fragmentation is a disadvantage. I suppose that if you are developing a new distribution, you would need to weigh up the pros and cons.
deb vs. rpm vs. gem Posted Mar 10, 2004 12:21 UTC (Wed) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] Naming conventions and packaging format are different things. One could use rpm, but add a postfix to differentiate from other distributions, e.g. something like "mc-4.5.55-mandrake.rpm" versus "mc-4.5.55-rocklinux.rpm". No one seems to do such sort of things though.
deb vs. rpm vs. gem Posted Mar 10, 2004 12:58 UTC (Wed) by crankysysadmin (guest, #19449) [Link] I don't think the postfix prevents problems. I have many times gotten RPMs from rpmfind.com that had postfixes for the distro, and they worked (by sheer luck -- this was way before I had any package mgmt clue). Then later I found similar packages I expected to work which required that I change out binx86 and everything higher, or something like that.If you're going to make Yet Another Distro of linux, you need either: 1) Yet Another Packaging System or 2) a packaging system that sits above the distro level and can recognize the distro itself as a dependency. I don't see anyone doing #2 real soon, unless this is a hidden attribute of APT or something. I think the lesson here is, if you don't like #1, stop making so many linux distros.
deb vs. rpm vs. gem Posted Mar 11, 2004 3:41 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] How about this?3) A build system which sits above the package level and manages dependencies for the distribution. THis is kind of what Gentoo does with Portage. The "packages" themselves are just tarballs; dependencies are tracked by the ebuild scripts for each package, which also take care of details such as patching and building the package.
deb vs. rpm vs. gem Posted Mar 10, 2004 15:09 UTC (Wed) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link] Umm... they do. Mandrake packages all have the suffix 'mdk' on theirrelease string, which makes the full name of Mandrake's current mc: mc-4.6.0-6mdk.i586.rpm
deb vs. rpm vs. gem Posted Mar 11, 2004 12:10 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link] You mean something like this:$ rpm -qa | head -5 mktemp-1.5-11mdk libpwdb0-0.61.2-3mdk make-3.80-5mdk gettext-base-0.13.1-1mdk ifplugd-0.21b-1mdkOkay, so it's not "mandrake" like you suggested, but rather "mdk", still same idea though.
deb vs. rpm vs. gem Posted Mar 10, 2004 14:29 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] Choice is good - but reinventing the wheel for n. time seems like a waste of time. Of course, if .gem has features that .rpm or .deb or .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 or .pkg or ... doesn't have, then it might be useful. I can see other ways to prevent the installation of non-distribution packages.
Rock Linux 2.0 released Posted Mar 10, 2004 15:06 UTC (Wed) by alanjwylie (subscriber, #4794) [Link] The comments about package formats are totally missing the point. What sets Rock apart from the likes of Debian and Red Hat is this it is not itself a distribution, but a Distribution Build Kit. In picking that one particular sentence out of the press release I'm afraid that the editors of LWN failed to grasp the concept of Rock.Rock is a toolkit that allows anyone to create their own customised Linux distribution by compiling from minimally patched sources. You can select the packages that you want, ranging between a stripped down LAMP server and a full Gnome and KDE desktop. You can select the processor type you want to optimise for, and you can even do a cross-compile between architectures. You can choose Sparc, or a generic I386, or optimise for an Athlon-XP, amongst many others. Have a look at The Linux Video Project for an example of what you can do with Rock.
Rock Linux 2.0 released Posted Mar 11, 2004 11:42 UTC (Thu) by crankysysadmin (guest, #19449) [Link] Pardon my ignorance, but how does Rock Linux:1) differ from Gentoo? 2) prevent you from having to package things? Regardless of how flexible Rock is, the moment it creates its own packaging system it is going to receive flak from the community (rightly or wrongly), and in that sense the package format discussion is not beside the point. In my humble opinion, the proliferation of Linux distros (and meta-distros and what have you: sorry, but Gentoo and Rock seem to me not essentially different from a regular old distro: you have your own sources, you have your own build process, etc.) is good in the short term, but eventually survival of the fittest is going to need to come into play. That SuSE and RedHat are currently "fittest" is solely a question of marketing "user-friendliness", but IMHO at the expense of reliability & simplicity (try messing with SuSE init scripts sometime! YAST --> SuSEConfig --> chkconfig --> insserv). I love Debian above all but it's not super-user-friendly. Gentoo is only interesting for people with fast machines IMHO (unless you have three weeks for every upgrade of glibc and binutils). So I'm all for continued proliferation of distros. But perhaps someone could adapt a package system like apt to regard the distro as a dependency, and then we could keep the same package system instead of creating a new one for each new distro.
Re: Rock Linux 2.0 released Posted Mar 11, 2004 12:39 UTC (Thu) by alanjwylie (subscriber, #4794) [Link] Pardon my ignorance, but how does Rock Linux:
It's similar, but was started much earlier -
2) prevent you from having to package things? Rock is a source based distribution build kit - Packages are just a convenient way of transferring object files from one Rock based machine to another. In 5 or 6 years of using Rock, I have never created a "package", other than during the creation of a boot and install CD.
That SuSE and RedHat are currently "fittest" is solely a question of marketing "user-friendliness", but IMHO at the expense of reliability & simplicity (try messing with SuSE init scripts sometime! YAST --> SuSEConfig --> chkconfig --> insserv). I love Debian above all but it's not super-user-friendly. Rock has specifically avoided "user friendliness". It does minimal patching of the original sources, and mostly uses the package's standard configuration, which you edit with a text editor. Scripts and configuration files are kept to a minimum, and are as simple as possible. Rock is designed for the experienced system administrator who doesn't want a distributor inserting superfluous layers beween them and the system. If your preferred method of configuring your systems is using "vi" over an ssh connection, then Rock might be the distribution for you.
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