[Bug 226377] Merge Review: rpm

[Axel Thimm]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 10:57:10AM -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
> In my opinion, there is a major difference between "allowing a package 
> to be in the Fedora repository" and "using a specific package as the 
> building block for the entire distribution". The first (allowing 
> packages into the repositories) is a technical-level decision. The 
> second (which packages are the core pieces of the Fedora distro) are 
> both technical and political.
> 
> In my opinion, at this point rpm5 is clearly in the first category, and 
> not the second.

As Panu nicely outlined, if rpm5 was to be in Fedora and not to
disrupt normal rpm/yum/etc operation it would be quite useless (it
wouldn't even know about the packages installed on this system).

I'd argue that it would even be still dnagerous if it's using its own
/var/lib/rpm5 rpmdb, as the rpm5-tesing user will not be really aware
that rpm5 -U/i foo is not really uninstalling the old package but
simply overwriting the files under rpm.org control.

If one were to address even the last issue raised above then rpm5
would hava a mandatory chroot (-r) argument to not pollute the normal
filespace.

What this means is that for rpm5 to technically play nice with rpm it
needs to be castrated beyond recognition. It would be probably blend
just as much as dpkg or gentoo build tools.

These technical blockers could be addressed if there were not the
political issues created by rpm5's developer.

Personally I think rpm is really in the second category above, after
all the operation of the low level package manager, e.g. rpm, is where
all our packages base upon. So it is a critical system component we
shouldn't be messing with even if the poiltical cliamte were
different.

(If the political climate *were* different there wouldn't be rpm.org
and rpm5 coexisting in the first place, so bringing in rpm5 into
Fedora would be quite a paradoxon ;)
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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