On Mon, 15 Apr 2024 at 10:34, Peter Pentchev <r...@ringlet.net> wrote: > > On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 07:39:54PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote: > > > Le 2/13/22 à 09:00, Mihai Moldovan a écrit : > > > > > > > I'm pretty sure that we can, at some point in the future, drop the > > > offending > > > > patch from the RPM package and all of this will be redundant. It > > > just requires a > > > > bit of work to make sure that older use cases (mostly alien) don't > > > break due to > > > > this, which might require a bit of development on RPM itself. It's > > > on my TODO > > > > list for very rainy and boring days, but unfortunately there's > > > almost always a > > > > truckload of other things to do, so I keep dragging it out. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Mihai > > > > > > > > > > I fully agree on removing the RPM patch that causes all of our issues > > > on packages depending on it. If needed, I'm willing to be part of > > > reviewing what would be the impact of returning to a standard RPM > > > package on Debian and to help into solving those issues. Don't > > > hesitate to ping me for that. > > > > I think the time has come to drop the RPM Debian-specific patches and > > avoid these workarounds altogether. > > > > Once upon a time it made sense to redirect the RPM DB, and to go out of > > our way to stop users installing RPMs locally, when RPMs were popular > > as a way to distribute upstream applications. > > > > Nowadays, the most common way to distribute upstream apps is via > > Flatpak/Appimage/etc, or (thanks to Ubuntu's popularity) via deb > > repositories, so the chances someone tries to 'sudo rpm -i foo.rpm' are > > very low. > > > > The main use of having rpm/dnf/zypper in Debian is not to convert RPMs > > with Alien or so, but it's to be able to do cross-distribution > > bootstraps and image building using native tools, like we do in mkosi > > (and in other tools as well). > > > > So these patches to print warnings and divert the database and so on > > are a hindrance. > > > > Hence, for Trixie I think we should just drop them all. > > > > It should also make it easier to maintain the RPM stack, which has > > languished. We are trying to move everything under the RPM Team Salsa > > org, which should also help. > > > > If there are any objections please speak up. > > I've thought about making this change at least once a year, but > I have always been, hm, should I say "too careful" (when of course > I actually mean "too scared")... so if you feel the time has come, > yeah, go ahead! > > G'luck, > Peter
If there are no objections, I will do this next weekend.