Fedora Mini - mini RPM

Andy Green andy at warmcat.com
Wed Apr 6 20:32:00 UTC 2005


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Alan Cox wrote:
| On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 12:15:42AM -0700, Pete Zaitcev wrote:
|
|>I am curious if anyone thought about starting some sort of "Small Server"
|>fork of Fedora. I figure it's not something that is a pure fantasy,
|>considering that Spot manages Aurora all by himself. Come to think of it,
|>what forks and derivatives of Fedora do we know?
|
|
| There have been tools like miniconda. I've been down this path a bit
and you
| hit a single fundamental near-insoluble problem - up2date/yum/rpm.
They burn
| resources and need some major rework at the rpm level - work that nobody
| afaik is assigned to do (I suspect we are talking full time engineer on
| such work).

Busybox has a really really minimal core re-implementation of rpm/cpio.
~ It's too minimal for real use, in fact, but it does work.  A few months
ago I did some work on it adding a "database" maintained in /var/lib/rpm
consisting of just the header part of all installed packages.  It has a
trawl through them to determine package requires and suchlike on -i -u
or -e.  The benefit is mainly thanks to the original implementation I
added to, the thing is incredibly lean in terms of memory use and
footprint, although since it was designed for an embedded RPM-based
distro scalability is a bit poor since there is no database but a bunch
of files to wander through and 'bunch' could be expected to be less than
20 for the use it was written for.

It's a http://warmcat.com/rpm.c if anyone is interested; needs to go in
./archival in the Busybox tree replacing the one that's there.

- -Andy
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFCVEdAjKeDCxMJCTIRAtCKAJ0SSG5Byef6LooXnlVdAdjDaaf7hgCeJ2vx
1c03yQnCBLLessJC8qCovas=
=v+u+
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list