[Rpm-maint] [Trip report] RPM Summit at the openSUSE conference in Nürnberg

[Florian Festi]

Hi!

I visited the openSUSE conference in Nuernberg Thursday the 17th and
Friday the 18th of September. I had been talking to the people at the
SUSE booth at the Linux Tag in Berlin and Zonker (the openSUSE
community manager) invited me to the openSUSE conf.

Being at a openSUSE conf with a Red Hat shirt is fun (I wore my black
Red Hat Europe shirt which doesn't look like a big ad poster but has a
nice little shadowman logo on the left chest). Lots of people were
asking whether I were wearing the right shirt for this occasion but
everybody had to admit that I actually was.

I gave a slightly modified version of my "What's happening in
RPM development?" talk I already gave on FudCon - twice actually.
Slides are attached.

Most of the other time we were working through a quite long list if
issues we had prepared in advance in the openSUSE and rpm.org wikis.
I actually was more interested in the general situation than in any of
the single topics. It turned out that there is not much difference in
the view on the different topics.

On Friday afternoon we also had two phone confs. One with Panu to
discuss our plans about File trigger/Lua Hooks which we also used to
clear question I didn't had a good answer the day before. The SUSE
folks are also very keen of getting rid of the large numbers of
scriptlets.

Afterwards we had a phone conf with Seth Vidal(and later James Antil)
from yum about soft requirements. This was very helpful as it cleared
up some misunderstandings about what SUSE actually does. It turns out
that they already have abandoned some of the previously added tags because
they cannot be supported properly. The discussion what to do on the
yum side still continues but the phone conf was a good step forward.


Single topics we discussed:

Questions and suggestions from SUSE:

Idea: %update scriptlets
=======================
Replace in and un scriptlets if present (they are not run).
They are a way of solving broken un scripts.
Still need to decide exact semantics/ when to run?
prein, postin, postun?

Suggestion: scriptlet args
==========================
Additional environment vars to make it easier for scriptlets to handle
special situations/detect what happens.

sameName, update, obsolte, updatedby, obesoletedby
pkgnumber, nevra, n, nev, neva, envra, (n, e, v, r, a)?
Triggers: update/triggering pkg

They are all arrays. Separator? " "?

Question: Package rename
========================
Treating obsoletes more like updates when trying to install a already
obsoleted package? Require --oldpackage? Remove obsoleting package?

post trans trigger
==================
Missing. Bug or Feature? Add for completeness?
What about post trans file triggers?

virtual triggers
================
match triggers against provides? Current behaviour bug or feature?
needed?

~ in Version
============
Wanted!

http://www.rpm.org/ticket/56
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=540558
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=466994

make ~ smaller than any other char to make
Patch exists, needs test coverage

Problems/Scriptlets (rpm.org wiki)
==================================
may be solved with %update and/or file triggers


Question and suggestions from the Red Hat Side:



Easy way to add generated provides/requires
===========================================
Wanted from the SUSE side!

Delta RPM
=========
Not much enthusiasm about porting to librpm.
Keep Jonathan in the loop.
Integrate new diff algorithm Jnovy is working on - either add or replace.

Suggestion: TS log
==================
Transaction log that allows recovery after a broken ts.
Positive interest from the SUSE side.

Suggestion: Recovery
====================
Run failed part of a previous transaction. (see TS log)
tsflags per te
run single scriptlets without everything else
Needs to be done by yum/zypper as they know where the packages are.
But API support in RPM needed.
Wanted by the yum people (yum complete transaction)
Positive interest from the SUSE side.

Suggestion: RPM log
===================
Have RPM log what has been done. Would replace similar features in
yum/zypper. Is more reliable as it would also work for RPM cli.
See:
http://en.opensuse.org/Libzypp/Package_History
yum history feature
Positive interest from the yum and SUSE folks


As you can see there is a lot of agreement and a couple of stuff that 
still need to be figured out. If anyone has questions or remarks feel 
free to pick something up or start a new thread. (In fact I should have 
opened a buch of tickets already)

I want to thank all the SUSE guys for their hospitality and I hope we 
can repeat this (probably with a bit shorter agenda). Meeting you once 
or twice a year would be really cool.

Florian
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