[Klug-general] Should RPM go away and Die a slow and painful death?

[George Prowse]

I hope you dont mind, after Solaris'ing a test box i'm going to discuss
the main points and change the subject line.

Karl Lattimer wrote:

> Agreed but its f*ck all to do with rpm, and hey its better than (un)
> united linux which i believe has crumbled after some in fighting. 
> Remember that LSB is a simple set of standards so systems can be 
> inter-compatible for things like initscripts and such like, not a 
> cartel of linux distributers who are angry at the linux share that 
> redhat has and wants a piece of the pie.

LSB is rubbish because you break it if you dont use rpm! How useless is
that!

>
> The simple fact here is that deb vs rpm is a moot point, rpm has got 
> better market penetration and is more widely adopted. The deb 
> community in general is slipping away, they have managed to make a 
> release this year so did apple, redhat, fedora and sun? Microsoft is 
> still nowhere to be seen and missing most of the tech they promised 
> instead touting the usual bullshit about security, stability and 
> reliability i think its their mantra now.

hmmm, I see similarities in the IBM and Apple early PC days here...

>
> The simple fact is, RPM has made it incredibly easy to run servers 
> throughout the world, suse/novell and redhat/ibm and many others have 
> benefitted from it, whereas deb has produced an almost impossible to 
> sell distro because of their attitude toward non gpl software, this 
> makes it harder to support from a hardware vendors perspective, they 
> trail behind on patches and updates because they even struggle to 
> release a distro. Deb is completely out dated and is difficult to 
> maintain, and build new distributions out of.

Undoubtedly RPM has helped out anyone wanting to install things on linux
and especially on anything production but the fact that remains is that
the flaws that were mentioned earlier have only started being addressed
in things like fedora where as apt saw the failures of rpm and addressed
it. I'm not saying apt is great, just its a superior product, apt
suffers from terrible logging that rpm doesn't though. But as you said
earlier, it took Red hat 4 MAJOR releases to fix some of the problems.

>
> RPM/Anaconda has been a vital tool, in places where there has been a 
> mass install of redhat/fedora (a number of US universities and other 
> institutions) they have found it easy to custom build their install 
> CD's update their install CD's, build kickstarts for unattended 
> installs with custom install cd's, maintain a package repository to 
> speed up yum transactions and maintain versioning throughout an 
> organisation.  These are all very important achievements of RPM/
> anaconda, deb has been left by the wayside as a result of the way 
> their community is run.

I totally agree with you here, Anaconda is a superb tool.

>
> So from my point of view, as a linux user, systems administrator, 
> programmer and general geek, rpm serves my needs, has better support 
> is more widely available and pretty easy to use, and I get to use 
> gnome 2.10 without much work i.e. putting a CD in and pressing the 
> big upgrade button. A few days pass and the bleeding edge distro is 
> even more bleeding edge and about a week from now I'll have gstreamer 
> with DVD menu's in totem, how long will it take deb to get that? 
> WITHOUT BUILDING IT FROM SOURCE!

I serves your needs barely, which for me isn't good enough.
It doesn't have better support, all that is needed for either is
documentation.
More widely avaliable? I can imagine the database is the same size. Or
do you mean external packages?
Bleeding edge? I thought you wanted stable? You are using it from a
production point remember...

>
> Not everyone wants to build a package from source when it doesn't 
> work, or its not available, for me that is a last resort. rpm/yum and 
> anaconda serve the needs of many. Me included I don't find the 
> problems you mention, as inhibiting factors. I find apart from the 
> odd nuisance of it rpm serves my needs and keeps things ship shape.
>
> k, 

I like not having the inhibiting factors or nuisances ;)

G

		
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