redhat abe

Jeff Johnson n3npq at nc.rr.com
Thu Jan 27 15:55:19 UTC 2005


Florian La Roche wrote:

>One of the very good items about yum is that it is actually using the
>rpmlib depsolver.
>  
>

Ditto wrto smartpm.

And up2date, and [rs]-c-p and apt and beehive and rhel-abe, for
various definitions of "use" rpmlib, for completeness.

up2date is perhaps the most techically close to "using" rpmlib, not that 
that
is any significant or serious advantage, rpmlib is not necessarily the best
depsolver in the world.

Nor is it very hard to write a goal-driven loop, traversing edges in
a dependency graph endlessly, which is all that rpmlib does.

What is needed is better policy, not universal "use", for choosing
packages to install, from repos, from "cloning" from other
machines, etc, as policy is better able to meet user expectations
of "works", in a way that stable known mechanism will never
be able to achieve.

rpmlib (and everything that uses) is quite stupid about choosing between
multiple provides, for one obvious example. Multilib, and kernel's, are
other known deficiencies in rp[mlib mechanism (or, if you will, the
lack of better policy mechanisms for depsolvers).

But depsolver policy is a much more complicated topic than using rpmlib ...
73 de Jeff




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