redhat abe

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 11:58 +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> 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.
You know, that I know :-)

I definitely appreciate this.

> > 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,
That's what I assume. It's just a package, not much different from
others, with bugs, deficiencies and "uniquenesses" of it's own. Nothing
more, nothing less.

>  but developing apt-rpm into various 
> directions required by FC (multilib,

ACK, that's apt's main deficiency.

>  new repodata format)
IMO, this is more a matter of politics and willingness, but a technical
requirement.

Technically, I don't see any need for apt to adopt yum's repodata
format. Politically, this requirement is introduced by RH not wanting to
add apt-repositories and fedora.us apparently being unable to set up
complete repositories. If apt-repositories are cleverly set up, the
additional overhead they introduce in addition to the original files
becomes more or less negligible.

BTW: Even SuSE is available with apt. I wonder why they don't have the
multilib issue - I guess they don't ship multilibs :)

Ralf