Re: redhat abe

[Panu Matilainen <pmatilai welho com>]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 08:52 -0500, seth vidal wrote:
> > > RH has the ability to change this at any time.
> >
> > ability? yes. willingness? no.
> >
> >
> > > It is not - RH has had no problems in adding yum support and has no
> > > problem in adding and removing other packages at any time at RH's free
> > > will.
> >
> > Do you know why they had no issue adding yum support? B/c it could be
> > covered internally. If it broke and I wasn't around to fix it - they
> > could take care of it.
> >
> > 100+ lines of C++ they were not interested in maintaining.
> How comes, FE/fedora.us is able to maintain it?

Fedora.us has/had an upstream apt-rpm developer (some weird masochist
sharing my mail-address :) maintaining it and writing all sorts of weird 
Lua-extensions to it to better fit the world of FC, external kernel-module 
packages and such.

> I know apt's code is ... ... leaves a lot to be desired, but it doesn't
> require that much effort to maintain the package.

Maintaining the package ain't hard, but developing apt-rpm into various 
directions required by FC (multilib, new repodata format) is just about as 
fun as pulling teeth without anesthesia. The new repodata is something 
that would be sanely implementable into apt, multilib as used in FC and 
RHEL (namely packages with same nevr but different arch simultaenously 
installed) is something that doesn't fit nicely into it's design. And 
that's putting it somewhat mildly. I've actually tried various approaches 
to adding multilib support to apt with varying success, however none of 
work well enough to be actually usable.

	- Panu -