[AuckLUG] Fedora release

[Michael J. Knox]

Martin Bähr wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 08:07:54PM +1200, Michael J. Knox wrote:
>> dependency hell == 1990 ;)
> 
> eh?

1990s... missed the s.. Not meant to be literal either, since RH 5 was
what, 1998 ?

Basically trying to imply that the "dependency hell" thing is long in
the past. I see that some people still have it from time to time, but
they are usually mixing many 3rd party repos.

And, rpm nor deb handle broken repos. yum and apt fail very poorly at
this. I have only ever seen smart handle a broken repo nicely, which is
what I used when packaging for Fedora extras prior to FC6 being release.
 (no long have time for Fedora packaging anymore.)

> 
>> I used the netinstall to install Fedora 7, worked a charm.
> 
> did you also try upgrade?

No, I never do upgrades. Always back up and clean install.

> i was never happy with rpm. and i used it until 2000/2001
> so rpm problems are certainly not 1990.
> 
> dependency hell may still be a thing of the past, as i stopped using rpm
> before apt for rpm and yum etc came out. however, until now i have not
> seen any report where someone was happier with rpm than with deb.
> (reports from people who never used a deb based system don't count)
> 
> and if you follow the current development of rpm, it does not increase
> my confidence in it at all. on the contrary.

Yeah, will see what happens. jbj seems focused on rpm version 5 while
the rpm.org effort seems to bring inline development efforts on the 4.X
version. jbj seems to have mellowed out since his departure from RH, so
hopefully he is in a more co-op and mature development frame of mind :)

> don't get me wrong. i would love to see rpm tools improve and become equal to
> deb tools in features and quality. i really hope that one day all major
> distributions will use the same packaging format and tools. but for now
> i don't see that happening. there is still to much room for improvement.

rpm vs deb is pretty the same IMHO. Both on their own (e.g rpm and dpkg)
are pretty useless. Its the tools that wrap around them that seperate
them (apt/yum/smart.. I would say yast, but eeww). Also, rpm was
designed with a different goal that deb. So they will always remain
different.

> the rpath stuff looks promising btw.

I worked with it for a brief period while fixing some driver issues for
Foresight Linux kernel package, which used conary, its a very different
approach to packing. Basically packaging meets revision control.

When I was using it, it was not very stable and each upgrade of conary
required manual "upgrades" in addition to the package upgrade. It was
also very slow IMHO. Since hitting 1.0 I think it has many of those
teething issues resolved. Michael K. Johnson and his boys have done a
fine job.

Michael