Fedora without RPM?

[Isaac Serafino]

Thank you, that sounds very helpful, but, unfortunately, Conary
doesn't sound like a viable replacement to RPM in Fedora yet, does it?

On 10/26/07, Bill Rugolsky Jr. <brugolsky at telemetry-investments.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 03:37:15PM +0930, Tim wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 17:58 -0500, Isaac Serafino wrote:
> > > Is there any way to get and use Fedora without the RPM program or any
> > > RPM packages, for instance, using an alternative package manager, or
> > > compiling everything from the source?
> >
> > I'd have to wonder why you'd want to do that.  You might as well do
> > Linux from scratch, or pick on of the other smaller distros which don't
> > use a package manager.
>
> One would like to do that because Fedora's innovation, engineering, and
> QA are very valuable, but RPM [or rather, its "coding in assembly" approach
> used in practice] is obsolete and not suitable in a networked world with
> distributed filesystems, virtualization, and lots of other configuration
> management headache multipliers.  It is possible to hack most RPM specs
> to operate at a much higher level using macros, but the amount of work
> involved is such that converting to a different mechanism is probably
> just slightly more work.
>
> The whole discussion recently regarding multilib and the pain of creating
> separate *-libs subpackaging just makes me laugh/cry: with rPath Conary,
> the packaging system separates tagging, policy, and mechanism.  Executables,
> shared libraries, and configuration files can all be treated differently
> *and* the policy is readily extensible / hookable.  [Conary is not without
> its own warts, but what is?]
>
> There has been work done in Conary to extract tarballs and patches from SRPMS,
>
>    http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary:RPM_Package_Recipe
>
> but I don't know of a mechanism for automatically converting a substantial
> fraction of spec files to Conary recipe format.  In principle, it is
> possible to process the spec file to determine things like patch application
> order, as is done in quilt setup:
>
>    http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/PatchingRPMsWithQuilt
>
> "Vanilla" rpm spec scripts that use %configure, %makeinstall, etc., should
> be rather trivial to convert.
>
> Regards,
>
>         Bill Rugolsky
>


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