Re: call for code audit help

[Helge Hess]

Hi,

e.sammer wrote:
> This is *the* question I always get and not without good reason. There 
> are some nice package managers out there. Without getting too deep into 
> it (as it is off topic here) we didn't just write another wrapper around 
> dpkg or rpm because there were some basic parts of the way the packages 
> and system were built that just wouldn't really fit the standards of 
> these package managers.

Hm, I don't know the opinion of the other people in this list, but IMHO 
this is very much on-topic, as pkg management is an important part of 
GNUstep as an environment. If it's not, drop me a line and we can take 
this off-list (of course, if you are still interested in discussion ;-)

> We drafted a design spec and then stuck to it
> which meant we couldn't go with rpm - it didn't have the features and we 
> couldn't go with dpkg / apt because to add the features we wanted that 
> it didn't have (which were very few) would make it awkward. For this 
> project, we needed to make sure we had exactly what we wanted and (for 
> now) that meant a new package manager.

Could you please line out the features it didn't had, especially for the 
RPM version ?

> The email I sent to the list
> wasn't meant to spark a package manager / ports / rpm / dpkg / linux / 
> bsd war; I thought some people might want to take a look at the code and 
> offer up some suggestions.

And it didn't ;-) I only want to understand problems coming along if I 
build our pkg system on RPM. Why not learn from others ;-) I don't want 
to convince you that you use something else, I only want to learn why 
you made this discision.

> I thought a lot about doing this, but honestly, rpm has a bit of feature 
> bloat, in my opinion and it tends to make it more complex than it's 
> worth.  I've been running SuSE for the last 5 years or so and the only
> time I actually use rpm is during a new system install (after which I 
> just compile from source - it's easier most of the time).

We are also using SuSE for years now and always use RPM to manage the 
installed packages. This got even easier with YOU and Red-Carpet.
What exactly do you consider complex about RPM ? I find it pretty easy, 
it's just a tgz, with metadata and 4 scripts ... ;-)

> > What's also missing for rpm is the "red-carpet" functionality which I 
> > definitly want to have.
>
> Very very true. Debian, by *far*, has the best package manager in my 
> opinion and lspm was modeled after dpkg / apt in many ways.

I don't know Debian so much, but I would like to point out that there is 
a difference between the package system "backend" and the frontend.
Like red-carpet shows (which I personally like a lot), the features can 
be implemented on top of RPM.

Greetings
  Helge