Bill Rugolsky Jr. 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used in practice] is obsolete and not suitable in a networked world with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
I am a person that uses software not available in rpm form. I
compile the packages after setting up the make files with .configure and
it works most times but not all. So I have loaded every version of Red
Hat from 5.2 and Fedora using rpm files and they work very well. I have
made a couple of rpm files and it is a lot of learning to do one.
I see no new option that is not just a re-work of apt or even rpm.
So why change now?
--
Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.
