[fab] dealing with rpm.

[seth vidal]

On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 14:22 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Aug 2006, seth vidal wrote:
> 
> > my response to the whole article:
> >
> > http://lwn.net/Articles/196593/
> 
> Good response, Seth.
> 
> Yes, there is a meeting up in Westford next week with stakeholders 
> throughout Red Hat engineering and Fedora who will be there.  In 
> particular, Jeremy and Bill will be at the meeting, and they are both 100% 
> capable of discussing RPM from the Fedora perspective.
> 
> So there will be more on this topic next week, but that said, I'm glad 
> that f-a-b is asking for updates and demanding action.

I've been talking with Paul Nasrat and Peter Bowen at novell quite a bit
today along with some other emails from the various stakeholders.

Here's something that's come out of all this:

1. jeff has said he is not upstream:


https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/rpm-devel/2006-August/001374.html

2. he says a fork of rpm for designs of other folks working on it has
his blessing

https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/rpm-devel/2006-August/001375.html


Here's what I'm thinking right now pending the discussion on monday at
rh:

  a. email the various stakeholders of rpm in distros and see if they'd
be interested in contributing to a new tree of rpm.

  b. setup rpm cvs at a non-distro-specific location. I volunteer space
on the machines linux.duke.edu and the yum/createrepo/etc repositories
run from. It's relatively distro-neutral and accounts there don't have
@fedoraproject or @redhat hung around them. I think it's important that
red hat/fedora not try to own this all in one place and with no other
contributors. It needs to be outside of a single company. 

  c. see if everyone would like to participate in a meeting/concall
sometime in the next couple of months so we can all get on the same page
and use the excuse to talk and drink. :) I think a lot of us realize how
much faster discussions/issues can be resolved if we can meet in person
at least once. Get a feel for everyone.
Talking to pzb - it might make sense if we can make it happen fast
enough to do something like Boston in October sometime. The suse/novell
people can get their easily and the rh/fedora people can too. we should
be able to find office space somewhere up there to sit and talk, etc.

  d. we figure out what goals we want to achieve among the fedora
contributors and discuss it with the other distros/people to find some
common ground.


Some thoughts on Goals for rpm:

The goals for rpm are kinda obvious in the general sense to me:
  - regular releases
  - development goals/roadmap
  - definition of parts
  - opening up development a bit more.
  - straightening out the bits we think need straightening. (tbd :)

Another point to hit:
 - the rpm 'trademark issue'  - Peter and I both had some zany ideas on
this, actually. (lpm, anyone? :)

 
 
anyway - that is most of what I'm going on right now.

what do y'all think?

-sv