I want to propose that we move to rpm5 to give the user the following usage experience: - easy to use smart package manager (using yum and rpm is optional) - the familiar rpm format for the actual package files - support from the rpm5 and the smart package manager community
Reasons for rpm5: - based wide spread use on desktop as well as server grade Linux based distros such as RHEL, rpm works well and meets our needs of a good modern package system - I have managed to build rpm5 and have requested Jeff Johnson, the present rpm5 maintainer and developer, to integrate two fixes needed to build rpm5 on the opensolaris platform - the current maintainers of rpm5 have given us a go ahead on bundling rpm5 with Belenix [1] - rpm5 is actively maintained [2] - it uses modern compression systems and libraries [3] - it is used by other distributions as well, who don't mind sharing their learning with us [4] Pending investigations: 1. Compatibiity with pkg-build spec files We could potentially directly consume all the pkg-build specific spec files in case we want to attempt source builds. I'm fairly confident this should work, and I will be working on a test case. This may very well be needed in case we use gcc to build KDE packages (necessary in case we don't use hajma's SS12 built KDE IPS packages). 2. Direct import of IPS files into rpm5 files. In case we decide to convert openindiana packages into rpm packages, we'll need something like alien which would read IPS and generate rpm files. This needs some investigation. I also propose that we use the smart package manager (http://www.labix.org/smart/): - There are a number of dependency resolution issues that the smart package manager has solved [5] - There are a number of interesting features [6] - There is wide spread adoption today of this tool by Ubuntu, Fedora, and Suse, and other efforts such as unitylinux. - smart provides many of the convenient command line parameters as does apt-get - the smart community members are OK with us bundling smart within Belenix [7] - Here is the smart package manager FAQ [8] Unfortunate reasons for not being able to use .deb files (the dpkg format) - At this time, the debian-legal community is still largely against of bundling Nexenta's zfs-aware dpkg with a distro. [9] - We don't have either the mental energy, the time, of the legal awareness to go argue with debian-legal - we don't want to get into disagreements with other open source and free software communities. Some thoughts on questions about apt-get 1. apt-get is great ! apt-get is a front for dpkg. The convenience of apt-get is matched by the smart package manager. 2. apt-get gives me everything Actually, apt-get merely queries a catalog of software, and let's us install, upgrade and remove software. A rich collection of software packages is something that the overall openindiana community can work together on (with Belenix being part of that community). 3. apt-get is easy to use Well, rpm has similar commands, and so does smart. Our overall emphasis should be on using the smart package manager which will consume rpm files underneath. Links: [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00519.html [2] http://rpm5.org/files/rpm/rpm-5.3/SNAPSHOT/ [3] http://rpm5.org/cvs/fileview?f=rpm/INSTALL&v=2.122.2.4 [4] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00521.html [5] http://zorked.net/smart/doc/README.html#study-cases [6] http://labix.org/smart/features [7] http://lists.labix.org/pipermail/smart-labix.org/2010-September/004099.html [8] http://www.labix.org/smart/faq [9] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2010/09/msg00001.html -- Sriram -- Belenix: www.belenix.org _______________________________________________ belenix-discuss mailing list http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/belenix-discuss http://groups.google.com/group/belenix-discuss
