[Rpm-ecosystem] RPM in ALT Linux (4.0.4 vs 4.13)

[Neal Gompa]

On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 7:28 AM, Ivan Zakharyaschev <imz at altlinux.org> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> On Sat, 3 Sep 2016, Neal Gompa wrote:
>
>> I saw you guys listed as the most recent ones to change the rpm
>> package in ALT Linux, and I was wondering if you guys had contemplated
>> upgrading from rpm 4.0.4 to rpm 4.13?
>
>
> glebfm@ and legion@ are busy now with this.
> https://lists.altlinux.org/pipermail/devel/2016-July/201603.html
>
> They could give most details about this process.
>
> The first thing to do on this way was to rebase many ALT's features[1] onto
> rpm(-install)-4.13. (Not yet features relevant for rpm-build.)
>

I'm sorry, I'm not too familiar with ALT's rpm setup, what is rpm-install?

> [1] https://www.altlinux.org/Rpm-4.13
>
>> If so, why haven't you? What's holding you back from upgrading? I'd
>
>
> Apart from the first important step (rebasing ALT's rpm-install) which has
> been done and is ready for testing, there are things would hold us back from
> putting the new version into ALT Sisyphus:
>
> those packages which use librpm and/or access RPM's db will have to be
> adapted for the new version. (The first one, of course, is APT; then, there
> are some Perl bindings actively used by the tools for automatic package
> analysis, modification, submission; perhaps, some more, I don't know the
> list of things that hold this back well, but other involved people could
> tell you more.)
>

As for APT, the Debian guys are actually interested in working with
RPM guys to integrate the backend into mainline APT. This would be a
good time to kill two birds with one stone. Julian Klode (juliank) on
#debian-apt on OFTC has already pulled in apt-rpm git master[1] and
I've sent him a PR including patches from Fedora that make it work
with RPM 4.13[2]. If you guys still want to pursue using APT for RPM
instead of using something like DNF, then it'd be a great idea if you
guys got involved in the effort to bring apt-rpm into the current apt
master. The merge of the rpm backend feature will lead to the release
of apt 2.0. I've been talking to Michael Vogt (mvo) and Julian Klode
about it for a while now, and it'd be great to get some people who
could help with making that merge happen.

I'm somewhat surprised that there are still distros using apt-rpm by
default, but if you guys like it and want to continue using it, I
think it'd be great if you could help with getting it merged into the
apt mainline codebase.

>> like to see the ALT Linux rpm maintainer team be involved in upstream
>> rpm.org development, as I'm sure your perspective would be valuable to
>> ensure a vibrant ecosystem around rpm.
>
>
> As said, there are a few ALT-specific nice, important and non-trivial
> features in RPM, which would always require maintaining a separate fork
> unless they are taken up by another RPM project, say, the rpm-4.13 project.
> Then the forces could be joined.
>
> One of these features is the support for set-versions (the <= relation,
> which is used to constrain Requires/Provides, which would behave not like a
> linear order, but like inclusion of sets), developed by at@ in the past.
> Now, he has announced that he is developing an enhanced varaint of this
> feature and could tell the details about the current developments to those
> who are interested.
> (https://lists.altlinux.org/pipermail/devel/2016-July/201614.html : support
> for prototypes/signatures similar to C++ mangling, but for C).
>

If any of you guys who know about the extra features of your variant
of rpm can talk about them, it'd be great if they could bring them up
in the rpm-ecosystem mailing list[3] to propose for them to be merged
upstream into the rpm.org codebase. Florian Festi (the manager of the
rpm project) is always interested in receiving patches for new
features and such. Patches are accepted via rpm-maint mailing list[4]
or GitHub[5]. Discussions can also occur on IRC on Freenode in
#rpm-ecosystem and #rpm.org.

> at@ has pointed to his new work at https://github.com/svpv/rpmss --
> https://lists.altlinux.org/pipermail/devel/2016-August/201701.html . At the
> same time, at@ shared his belief that if there is some code in ALT's RPM
> which was once written and works correctly since then, there will be no need
> to put efforts into maintaining it; and so, he sees no justification in the
> complex work of rebasing onto rpm-4.13 because this would not save us any
> future efforts in maintaining ALT's RPM compared to the current situation.
> (Zero efforts if the current code of RPM works correctly.)
>

I'm somewhat biased, I guess, but as one of the folks who works on rpm
in Mageia, I personally prefer minimizing our delta with upstream so
that there's a strong point of collaboration and when new versions
arrive, we can take them in easily. And the rpm.org community is
rather nice and helpful.

> glebfm@ -- Gleb Fontengauer-Malinovskiy
>
> legion@ -- Alexey Gladkov
>
> at@ -- Alexey Tourbin
>
> community-en at lists -- a mailing list for the community around ALT for
> discussions in English
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Ivan
>

Best regards,
Neal

[1]: https://github.com/julian-klode/apt/tree/feature/rpm
[2]: https://github.com/julian-klode/apt/pull/4
[3]: http://lists.rpm.org/mailman/listinfo/rpm-ecosystem
[4]: http://lists.rpm.org/mailman/listinfo/rpm-maint
[5]: https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm

--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!