[Comm-en] RPM in ALT Linux (4.0.4 vs 4.13)

[Ivan Zakharyaschev]

On Sun, 4 Sep 2016, Neal Gompa wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 7:28 AM, Ivan Zakharyaschev <imz at altlinux.org> wrote:

>>> 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?

Simply, there is the rpm-build part of RPM which is used to create files 
of RPM format; and the "other" part, the essential one, the tool of the 
administrator which takes an RPM file and installs it, etc. To distinguish 
this basic part from rpm-build, we have been calling it rpm-install 
sometimes.

(Theoretically, they are not tightly connected, and any other tool could 
be used instead of the standard rpm-build to produce RPM files if you 
target a distro which uses rpm to install packages, to control their 
dependencies etc. So, if someone thinks that the language of spec-files is 
ugly--like me--one can think about creating an alternative tool to 
describe the packages in another language, but still submit them to the 
same distro; for example, I'm interested in the way nix packages are done, 
and sometimes I'm thinking about various proxies like a tool to build an 
RPM package from nix rules, but also other kinds of proxies, in order to 
make the current work in ALT Sisyphus and in NixOS closer and more 
suitable for exchanging packages, switching the sources of the "specs".)

>> [1] https://www.altlinux.org/Rpm-4.13

>>> 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.

> 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

Thanks for the links! Let's look forward. One more small comment from 
me: in a sense, it would be a good moment now to merge some patches right 
after Gleb has rebased the features onto 4.13, so that there is no delta. 
If you are interested in the patches, of course, you can have a look in 
the Git repository in the linked task (in one of the linked posts) and ask 
the authors any questions, but I'd suggest to wait until it is committed 
to ALT Sisyphus; then, it would be in a more finalized state.

http://git.altlinux.org/tasks/166699/

> 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.

Best regards,
Ivan