Thanks to your being slashdotted I was able to discover you and your team's work. Over the past couple months I've been putting together a Solaris port of the Mandrake cooker distribution (initially RedHat rawhide). It would seem that we share some common goals like
1) Being able to have an RPM distribution sit parallel to the underlying OS (I've been using /opt/rpmsw). 2) Build an RPM distribution that's not OS specific. I'm building a computing infrastructure where I work (Cal Poly University) similar to a hosting model where project teams can 'check out' thin servers from a server library. In order to do this, I saw using RPM as a good way to manage the user applications. Over the past couple days, I've been in contact with Adrian Reber from the Univ of Esslingen who's doing the same. We're talking about consolidating. Of course that's when I discovered OpenPkg which in some areas is much further ahead. I'm especially glad that you have the support infrastructure (docs, release engineering, etc.) around your packages. In contrast I've just got a bunch of spec files which I've hacked to get working on Solaris. So I'm thinking, why not join you guys. I really like that you've modded the RPM source to make it more cross-platform. By contrast, I've just got a bunch of %ifos in the specfile which is messy. In a similar vein, the Fink project is doing a similar thing for MacOSX. I think were this to combine, (though it's Debian based) openpkg could be very attractive for installing OpenSource software on commercial Unices. I've got a few questions though on development points: 1) Why is everything statically linked? On Solaris, the philosophy is to dynamically link everything. Could this be changed? 2) I get the feeling that you've started with the base packages without dependencies. For example, specifically disabling ncurses and such. Do you envision putting these dependencies back in? I suppose this really gets to the philosophy of making everything so vanilla that it works on all platforms. I think something is lost when this happens. 3) RPM macros that are really nice. Have you thought about incorporating Mandrake/RedHat things like %_install_info and such into your spec files so that the distribution starts to feel like a coherent whole rather than a bunch of individual packages Also stuff like breaking up the RPM binaries into somepkg and somepkg-devel RPMs? 4) KDE & GNOME! These are really the biggies for us as I think having a KDE/GNOME environment makes things better for our users who are accustomed to Windows, not CDE. Do you plan on adding this support? I don't mind porting existing RPMs to your spec file standards. 5) Why no %changelog? It's great to scan through a Mandrake/RedHat spec file and see what changed so that you can incorporate that into your own RPM. So the above are a bunch of things that I've tried to address in my own (CalPoly) distribution, and wonder what you think about these. I'd love not to reproduce effort that you've done and would be happy to offer my help. How can I get involved? What is your build lifecycle/team structure like? How could I contribute new packages/package updates (like enabling ncurses :) I look forward to starting up a dialog. Best regards, Garrett Conaty ______________________________________________________________________ The OpenPKG Project www.openpkg.org Developer Communication List [EMAIL PROTECTED]
