The return of the Mer project

Posted Oct 3, 2011 21:07 UTC (Mon) by xxiao (guest, #9631)
In reply to: The return of the Mer project by jospoortvliet
Parent article: The return of the Mer project

really? rpm is floated for embedded devices to say the least.
sadly, OE(read Yocto/Intel) is also rpm-by-default nowadays. Intel is ruining things badly wherever it has anything to do with non-PC devices.

The return of the Mer project

Posted Oct 4, 2011 8:30 UTC (Tue) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] (7 responses)

What's the issue with rpm ?
It's basically an archiving file format, with more or less the same capabilities as deb, isn't it ?

Alex

The return of the Mer project

Posted Oct 4, 2011 9:30 UTC (Tue) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link] (6 responses)

I think primarily, it's a religion, not an archiving / packaging format ;-)

That seems to be the root cause for the neverending deb vs. rpm debate (which totally misses the point, IMO).

The return of the Mer project

Posted Oct 4, 2011 12:04 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (3 responses)

The formats are probably much of a muchness, but the default tools for interactive RPM selection sent me reaching for the titanium sporks. (Whereas I always found dselect quite congenial, and its successor aptitude likewise.)

Is there a deb-based distro release using systemd as its default PID 1 yet?

The return of the Mer project

Posted Oct 4, 2011 12:30 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder what you mean by "default tools for interactive RPM selection"? Have you ever tried YaST?

The return of the Mer project

Posted Oct 4, 2011 12:41 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

Briefly. I've got a machine with OpenSUSE installed, but I don't actually use it. I seem to remember finding it significantly less congenial than aptitude or dselect.

The return of the Mer project

Posted Oct 4, 2011 13:35 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

The alternative you aren't acustomed to use to the point that the fingers know how to do common tasks will seem a lot less congenial. Nothing very surprising there.

The return of the Mer project

Posted Oct 4, 2011 13:33 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

At the root of all geek religious wars, be it vi vs emacs, BSD vs Linux, RPM vs deb, is that the alternatives fought over are different in details, but almost exactly the same in terms of functionality.

The return of the Mer project

Posted Oct 5, 2011 4:20 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

It can get a bit silly, but some of the details can sort of matter.

As for the deb/rpm case, I'd say the formats and related tools have done some learning from each other, at least, which is useful.

But yeah the froth is probably eternal.

The return of the Mer project

Posted Oct 10, 2011 13:11 UTC (Mon) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]

sadly, OE(read Yocto/Intel) is also rpm-by-default nowadays.

I'm sorry but this is untrue. OpenEmbedded-Core (the new basis for OE) is still configured for ipk packaging by default. The Yocto Project uses rpm by default but can be easily configured to use ipk. Whilst you may not understand it there is high demand for rpm amongst commercial embedded build system users and we have to cater for that.

That said, just because we support rpm, it does not mean that ipk is deprecated or that it will suffer. We treat any issue with ipk packaging as seriously as we would treat an equivalent issue with rpm. FWIW, for many of my development build setups I usually use ipk myself.