http://lwn.net/Articles/49665/
The anticipated announcement by Red Hat, Inc. about the future direction of the Red Hat Linux Project, originally scheduled for publishing early this week, was rudely postponed by the imminent arrival of hurricane Isabel in North Carolina. But even as preparations for the potential natural disaster took precedence over writing code, Red Hat still found time to update us on the progress. "We are excited to announce that we are working on an alliance with another well-known provider of Red Hat compatible packages", claims the updated Red Hat Linux Project page. It also promises to release a full announcement, and possibly a new Red Hat beta, on Monday, September 22. One of the more exciting aspects of this change in direction for Red Hat Linux is introduction of an advanced RPM package manager into the distribution. Traditionally, a lack of one, especially a lack of one with the ability to auto-resolve dependencies, has been a sore point with many users of Red Hat, SuSE and most other RPM-based distributions who often found it frustrating to install or upgrade software. In recent years, many settled on using a third-party application, such as apt-get, apt4rpm or yum, but nevertheless, Red Hat and SuSE's reluctance to provide and support any of them was not appreciated. Luckily, the Linux world is changing fast and Red Hat no longer sees the traditional retail boxed sets as a major income provider. This was possibly one of the reasons for introducing "yum" into Red Hat Linux. Before we get to explore the wonderful world of advanced package managers, let's take a look at the RPM. Often incorrectly referred to as "Red Hat Package Manager", the abbreviation actually stands for "RPM Package Manager", a recursive acronym often found in UNIX and Linux worlds. "The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating computer software packages.", asserts the rpm.org website. The format was developed by Red Hat Inc. at some point in mid-nineties, when the Linux distribution market was utterly dominated by Slackware Linux and its TGZ package format. TGZ packages were (and still are) nothing more than simple compressed archives of individual files along with a script that places them into correct directories during installation. When RPM arrived, it was seen as a huge improvement over TGZ. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the RPM package format played a crucial role in the dramatic swing in Linux market share - away from Slackware and towards Red Hat. In the following years, the RPM package format was also adopted by SuSE, Mandrake, Caldera, Turbolinux and many other distributions. As wonderful as RPM was compared to TGZ, it was the non-commercial Debian project which sprinted ahead in the package management game in March 1999 with the introduction of APT in Debian 2.1. APT is a front-end to Debian's own package management with an ability to resolve software and library dependencies. This proved to be a very successful tool and the RPM package manager was soon to be subjected to crude jokes by Debian users and developers. However, they only lasted till December 2000 when Conectiva Linux ported APT to create apt-rpm and incorporated it into its own distribution. Many other RPM-based distributions followed suit and apt-rpm was soon spotted in projects ranging from Russia's ALT Linux to Japan's Vine Linux. Confidence in RPM was slowly returning into the world of Linux users - except for the users of the Red Hat distribution who will have to wait until late this year before they can enjoy supported advanced package management with dependency resolution. ... -- Sanjeev "have you subscribed to LWN?" Gupta _______________________________________________ ilugd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
