rpm5.org launched

[Posted May 29, 2007 by corbet]

A new site has been launched at rpm5.org; it claims to be "the home of the official RPM Package Manager (RPM) code base". This site should not be confused with rpm.org, which is the home of Red Hat's fork of RPM; rpm5 is the Jeff Johnson fork. A RPM5 roadmap has also been posted: "The main RPM development is already focused on the development of the forthcoming RPM 5.0. The primary goals of RPM 5.0 are the additional support for the XML based archiving format XAR, an integrated package dependency resolver, further improved portability and extended cross-platform support."

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rpm5.org launched

Posted May 29, 2007 16:01 UTC (Tue) by mmazur (guest, #42142) [Link] (4 responses)

The nice thing about the announcement and the website is that it sends a
clear message to the general public, that there actually exists a version
of rpm that's actively in development and used by at least a couple of
projects. This is a nice thing to have, considering that the RedHat
announcements from some time ago (about they're revived interest in the
project) hardly mentioned the fact.

Making sure that we don't end up with two incompatible forks of rpm is
another matter however. Especially considering that rpm5 wants to
actually get some major features in place.

rpm5.org launched

Posted May 29, 2007 16:38 UTC (Tue) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (3 responses)

However, using a domain name that includes the version number could be interpreted as a message of the opposite kind, namely that the project is not going to be developed beyond version 5.

rpm5.org launched

Posted May 29, 2007 16:59 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)

aah, come on, that's nitpicking. I think it's great - it makes clear they
want to go for the next generation, not just some small improvements.

rpm5.org launched

Posted May 30, 2007 1:05 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (1 responses)

Jeff Johnson has the next couple versions registered too.

whois rpm6.org

whois rpm7.org

rpm5.org launched

Posted Jun 1, 2007 20:12 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Just don't needlessy bump the version numbers. "RPM 5" is a catcher, but at the end of the day "RPM 137" does not cut it anymore. Anything beyond 11 is declining in strength of eyecatching.

rpm5.org launched

Posted May 29, 2007 16:58 UTC (Tue) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link] (4 responses)

But will the distros touch it?!

With all the craziness and rudeness that is Jeff Johnson.
I think it's more a case of him attempting to outshine RedHat after they parted ways... particularly since RPM.org was only recently announced that they were renewing it with input from the major RPM vendors (Suse, Redhat, Mandriva, etc).

Hopefully there is some cross sharing... I would rather see one version than a fork.

Seeing rpm4 came out in 2001... I can see RPM5 lasting for some time. :)

rpm5.org launched

Posted May 29, 2007 17:45 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (guest, #2330) [Link]

If there are two forks, one supported by Red Hat/Fedora, Novell/SUSE, and Mandriva, and one supported by Jeff Johnson, it doesn't matter how the two compare feature-for-feature. What's going to matter is that one fork will work in the context of the distros that people actually use, and the other will be irrelevant.

rpm5.org launched

Posted May 29, 2007 20:51 UTC (Tue) by mmazur (guest, #42142) [Link] (1 responses)

For some clarification -- it's not just about Jeff. Open source projects
are about having an active *developer* community around them. And Jeff is
not the only one actually working on that tree. There are lots of other
people providing both minor and major changes. Do keep in mind, that for
quite some time there was no other public project, that actually did
active rpm development. RedHat, considering it's enterprise target, is
quite conservative in this regard. And yes, that's enough for rpm5 to
stay afloat.

As far as I know, the most well known project actually using Jeff's tree
is Mandriva. The second biggest distro would probably be PLD
(www.pld-linux.org). Other then that, there are at least a few other
minor distros + some other projects.

rpm5.org launched

Posted May 29, 2007 21:24 UTC (Tue) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link]

Is this the same guy who removed database locking from RPM at one point while working for RedHat? If so color me less than interested in RPM5.

rpm5.org launched

Posted May 30, 2007 9:26 UTC (Wed) by freggy (guest, #37477) [Link]

Mandriva did not follow Red Hat and SuSE but is already using the one from rpm5.org and will continue to do so. Looking at the rpm5 team, I'm even not so sure that the RH/Novell branch (which failed to publish a single release in 6 months) will be the leading one in the end.

XAR

Posted May 30, 2007 21:04 UTC (Wed) by claesh (guest, #45513) [Link] (1 responses)

What I found more interesting than the RPM announcment was the (for me) unknown archiver XAR. What are the chances that xar will become widespread in the free software community? Technically, it seems interesting. Gnu tar still does not have support for xattrs...

XAR

Posted Jun 7, 2007 9:56 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

If it can do zip-like per-file compression rather than being a compressed stream (important for robustness especially across multi-volume backups) and remain extractable without a master index at end-of-file, provide archive integrity features and offer a supplimental and non-critical archive index for faster access ... then I'll be on it in a second. Per-file encryption would be a killer too.

tar+gz and zip are both uninspiring for backups and other purposes. Both are too prone to certain types of damage causing total loss of the contents of the archive, and neither provide any solid insurance of archive integrity.

rpm5.org launched

Posted Jun 1, 2007 20:14 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

And the next step Redhat takes is creating rpm3k!