What is Fedora? [LWN.net]

What is Fedora?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:04 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: What is Fedora? by mjthayer
Parent article: What is Fedora?

The last point you mention is key to Gentoo's approach. It is ok to enable users to pull in selectively from a unstable repo but this approach does not really work well for packages with complex dependencies in a binary distribution.

If you do say, yum --enablerepo=rawhide update python to grab a new version of Python, you might be practically getting the entire development repo because every python program might be rebuild for a change in the ABI. A build with paths changed to install in parallel is a workaround in some cases but not always. Cherry picking "stable" versions is also problematic for similar reasons.

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What is Fedora?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:18 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (2 responses)

You are right that handling the ABI aspects would make this a major and long term project, involving a lot of upstream work. Albeit I think a worthwhile project. The autopackage people did a lot of good research into this; just a shame about their package format...

There are other aspects too - some people might have objected to an automatic upgrade e.g. from OpenOffice 2 to OpenOffice 3 when version 3 became stable, so that (the extra work of) maintaining both in parallel would make sense. This would probably be more relevant to distributions like RedHat than to Fedora though.

What is Fedora?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:45 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (1 responses)

Not necessarily, if you build the unstable packages from source. I believe dpkg can build a binary package from a source package and then install it.

If apt could have some knowledge about this, it wouldn't be hard to flag a package as from the unstable tree and let apt build it and the required dependencies from source.

I believe Arch does this

Posted Oct 29, 2009 13:51 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

I think this is the concept behind Arch's rolling release model.