APT, Yum and Red Carpet

[Jef Spaleta]

Hans Deragon wrote:

>apt/synaptic is already developped by debian users. It is code already
>reused from another distribution. But you have a point to some extent.

I think you missed my point about development momentum..and development
path INSIDE rhl. Would you also suggest that redhat use debian's package
format in place of rpm....and how about using debian's installer in
place of anaconda. Like I said you'd have to be pretty persuasive to
convince people get rid of the redhat's homegrown tools in place of
something else. There are rare moments in a project's development
lifespan where dropping a toolset in favor of a different ones is going
to actually be the developer preference.  Hell lets just drop redhat's
homegrown tools completely...all of the python based redhat-config-*
tools..and just start from scratch with debian stable...thats my vote.
You need to keep in mind the real investment in development manhours
that has been made on a specific technology implementation that is
already in rhl. the python tools arent going anywhere...and if you can
roll functionality into those existing python tools then the longterm
development effort is better spent doing that. adding yet another gui
tool (synaptic) is not the right way to do it. You want to extend your
investment in the toolset you have...extend the functionality of
anaconda and r-c-p into accessing 3rd party repos.  A quick synaptic fix
is not the best use of previous developer time investments nor future
development time.  There will ALWAYS be better featuresets in some other
piece of software that tries to provide the functionality you want to
provide...but there are long term development trade-off especially if
you are trying to integrate that functionality into multiple tools.
Wouldn't you love to see a native install option of askmethod to be a
repository? How does investing in synaptic going to give you that.
Investing in a python native way to access repositories seems like a
natural first step for longer term goals surrounding the existing python
based tools.  My crystal ball tells me the next 2 years will
be...fascinating.


-jef"but if redhat moves to the slackware installer code base..my
argument is null and void"spaleta
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