RH Decisions (was Re: APT, Yum and Red Carpet)

[Rik van Riel]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Bruce A. Locke wrote:

> We need a sane dependency tree for the vast amount of software out there
> for Red Hat that doesn't require "--forcing" and "--nodeps" or end-users
> spending time with "rpmbuild".  (Small repositories will of course still
> exist for those _really_ niche packages).    Encouraging the development
> of even more external repositories sounds like a sure way of increasing
> the pain of "RPM dependency hell".

I agree with you that we need to avoid an RPM dependency
hell.  However, I do not agree with you that the only way
to do it is to have all packages shipped by one central
organisation.

Instead, we need to work on some software that can detect
dependency conflicts between the external repository and
the core distribution and rebuilds the RPMS in the repository.

Of course, this software would be run by the people who
maintain the package repositories, so the repositories
are in sync with the core distribution.

Nothing like a cron job to automatically keep the RPMS in
the repositories up to date with the core distribution ;)

It really isn't hard to automatically bump the release
number and rebuild the RPM, nor should it be very hard
to figure out when exactly it is needed ... right at
the point when apt-get starts complaining ;)

Now we just need to write this software ...

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan