[Gllug] 2.4.15

[itsbruce at uklinux.net]

On 11/23/01, 3:01:11 PM, Nick Mailer <nickm at positive-internet.com> wrote 
regarding RE: [Gllug] 2.4.15:


> >
> > Conectiva now have apt working stably with rpm fwiw.  There was an
> > interesting review of it on the Duke of Url, recently.
> >

> What do you mean by "apt working stably with rpm"?

dpkg is not the first package management system that Debian has used and 
may not be the last, so the Debian developers divided the package 
management tasks into a local package manager (dpkg at the moment) and an 
upper layer that both provides a front-end to the package manager and 
adds the remote-download-source management: apt.  Apt was designed so 
that the package management tool could be replaced - all that is needed 
is an interface layer between apt and the packaging app.

So on Conectiva you type 'apt-get install postfix' and just as on Debian 
it goes and fetches the rpm from whichever repositories you have set 
(remote ftp site, local cd etc).  The difference is that it fetches an 
rpm and uses rpm to install it.

Apt is only part of the pattern, though: you also need a properly 
maintained package archive and a coherent packaging policy.  You can't 
just point apt-rpm at rawhide.

Apt is a great tool and it would IMO be good to see it available to more 
rpm-based distributions.  I don't think Red Hat have much of an 
incentive, though - it offers free competition to the Red Hat Network.  
Still, that wouldn't stop anybody else adapting Conectiva's port to work 
on Red Hat - there are plenty of unofficial Debian archives (that's the 
whole point) so no obstacle to there being unofficial Red Hat apt 
archives.

I don't think Bob Young would object, either (not that he'd have any 
grounds to).  Red Hat have always been careful to keep their core CD sets 
open source and they wouldn't want to stop anything that might make even 
more people use RH.

-- 

Bruce

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug