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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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 used in practice] is obsolete and not suitable in a networked world with 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 > -- isAAc4given findmercy.com Let the Lord be magnified!
