Re: Project status/future
On Tue, Sep 22, 2009, Dan wrote: Ralf S. Engelschall wrote: On Mon, Sep 21, 2009, Stefan Palm wrote: 1) After playing around a little with OpenPKG I'm wondering about this projects status. The last (official) release is dated from 2007-12-27, quite a lot of pages at openpkg.org are outdated and the mailings list seem to be rather quiet. All this gave me the impression that this project is about to fade away. Is that correct? No, OpenPKG certainly is not fading away. We were just too busy with other earn-a-living jobs and OpenPKG 4.0 was still not ready until recently. Hence we kept the websites around until we have something new. Now that OpenPKG 4.0 is stable and already working on lots of production servers, it will be officially released soon -- together with a new website. That the last official bootstrap is from 2007-12-27 was intentionally, as this was the last time we updated the old RPM 4 based bootstrap. Since this time we worked on the RPM 5 based one for OpenPKG 4.0. I thought the whole point of closing off access to the code and charging for support was to fund the project. If the userbase has shrunk and the paying subset is too small to generate adequate income, why not open the project back up until it reaches critical mass? OpenPKG _is_ open: you can get anything in source form and you can also use it for free as long as the promotion period is extended by us (PROMO license) or forever if you are willing to regularily upgrade to the latest version (COMMUNITY license). More details will follow soon on the website... Ralf S. Engelschall r...@engelschall.com www.engelschall.com __ OpenPKG http://openpkg.org User Communication List openpkg-users@openpkg.org
Re: Project status/future
Ralf, Am Montag, 21. September 2009 21:41:11 schrieb Ralf S. Engelschall: No, OpenPKG certainly is not fading away. We were just too busy with other earn-a-living jobs and OpenPKG 4.0 was still not ready until recently. Hence we kept the websites around until we have something new. Now that OpenPKG 4.0 is stable and already working on lots of production servers, it will be officially released soon -- together with a new website. thanks for the update! I was almost close to asking the same question. :) Is there something that we (as in the community) could help with? That the last official bootstrap is from 2007-12-27 was intentionally, as this was the last time we updated the old RPM 4 based bootstrap. Since this time we worked on the RPM 5 based one for OpenPKG 4.0. Congrats also on the article in c't 20/2009! For all others: The c't is a reputated computer german magazine and Ralf wrote an article about package management which basically is about rpm5 and its use in OpenPKG: http://www.heise.de/ct/inhalt/2009/20/184/ Praxis Erweiterter Paketversand Neue Funktionen in RPM 5 nutzen RPM 5, Fork und inoffizieller Nachfolger des RPM Package Manager, wirft eine ganze Menge Ballast ab und und bringt ein Bündel neuer Funktionen mit. So ist RPM 5 plattformunabhängig und unterstützt das Verwalten und Erstellen ganzer Softwarestacks. Schlagwörter: Softwareverwaltung, Softwareverteilung, RPM Package Manager Pages 184ff Bernhard -- Managing Director - Owner: www.intevation.net (Free Software Company) Germany Coordinator: fsfeurope.org. Coordinator: www.Kolab-Konsortium.com. Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998 Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: Project status/future
On Mon, Sep 21, 2009, Jeff Johnson wrote: On Sep 21, 2009, at 3:41 PM, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote: No, not worth the effort as even in the days of GNU libtool it is an endless effort when it comes to true cross-platform solutions like OpenPKG. And beside faster updates in case of security issues (because you don't have to rebuild the application) there is no real advantage in practice. The disadvantages (portability issues) fully destroy the advantages. What's the actual engineering issue with dynamic vs static? Is it just that there's too many flavors of dynamic linking? Just curious, not questioning at all. The problem is that (1) building shared libraries is platform-specific, (2) not all Unix platform support path stickyness (like cc -Wl,-R) and (3) OpenPKG is a multi-instance solution. So, first, all packages which are not GNU libtool based would have to be manually teached how to build shared libraries and second, on some platforms we even might need program wrappers which set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH accordingly (as we cannot import the while OpenPKG prefix/lib into the global system library path as OpenPKG supports multiple instances and hance there are multiple prefix/lib directories). And finally, the whole shared library business is not worth the effort at all because the advantages (less disk space, faster updates and sharing code segments in RAM) are either harmless (disk space and code segments) or (in case of faster updates) are less then the disadvantages (mentioned above). Ralf S. Engelschall r...@engelschall.com www.engelschall.com __ OpenPKG http://openpkg.org User Communication List openpkg-users@openpkg.org
Re: Project status/future
Ralf S. Engelschall wrote: On Mon, Sep 21, 2009, Stefan Palm wrote: 1) After playing around a little with OpenPKG I'm wondering about this projects status. The last (official) release is dated from 2007-12-27, quite a lot of pages at openpkg.org are outdated and the mailings list seem to be rather quiet. All this gave me the impression that this project is about to fade away. Is that correct? No, OpenPKG certainly is not fading away. We were just too busy with other earn-a-living jobs and OpenPKG 4.0 was still not ready until recently. Hence we kept the websites around until we have something new. Now that OpenPKG 4.0 is stable and already working on lots of production servers, it will be officially released soon -- together with a new website. That the last official bootstrap is from 2007-12-27 was intentionally, as this was the last time we updated the old RPM 4 based bootstrap. Since this time we worked on the RPM 5 based one for OpenPKG 4.0. I thought the whole point of closing off access to the code and charging for support was to fund the project. If the userbase has shrunk and the paying subset is too small to generate adequate income, why not open the project back up until it reaches critical mass? Ralf S. Engelschall r...@engelschall.com www.engelschall.com __ OpenPKG http://openpkg.org User Communication List openpkg-users@openpkg.org
Re: Project status/future
Thank you for the explanation, Ralf. And although I do understand your argumentation I don't agree with your conclusion regarding the shared libraries. Anyway, just my two cents. Stefan __ OpenPKG http://openpkg.org User Communication List openpkg-users@openpkg.org
Re: Project status/future
On Sep 22, 2009, at 2:14 AM, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote: (3) OpenPKG is a multi-instance solution. Bingo. That engineering reason I understand well (from wrestling with --root and rpmdb solutions in RPM almost daily). 73 de Jeff __ OpenPKG http://openpkg.org User Communication List openpkg-users@openpkg.org
Re: Project status/future
On Mon, Sep 21, 2009, Stefan Palm wrote: 1) After playing around a little with OpenPKG I'm wondering about this projects status. The last (official) release is dated from 2007-12-27, quite a lot of pages at openpkg.org are outdated and the mailings list seem to be rather quiet. All this gave me the impression that this project is about to fade away. Is that correct? No, OpenPKG certainly is not fading away. We were just too busy with other earn-a-living jobs and OpenPKG 4.0 was still not ready until recently. Hence we kept the websites around until we have something new. Now that OpenPKG 4.0 is stable and already working on lots of production servers, it will be officially released soon -- together with a new website. That the last official bootstrap is from 2007-12-27 was intentionally, as this was the last time we updated the old RPM 4 based bootstrap. Since this time we worked on the RPM 5 based one for OpenPKG 4.0. 2) The FAQ states that someday OpenPKG might support dynamically linked (internal) libs. Are there any news on that? No, not worth the effort as even in the days of GNU libtool it is an endless effort when it comes to true cross-platform solutions like OpenPKG. And beside faster updates in case of security issues (because you don't have to rebuild the application) there is no real advantage in practice. The disadvantages (portability issues) fully destroy the advantages. Ralf S. Engelschall r...@engelschall.com www.engelschall.com __ OpenPKG http://openpkg.org User Communication List openpkg-users@openpkg.org
Re: Project status/future
On Sep 21, 2009, at 3:41 PM, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote: No, not worth the effort as even in the days of GNU libtool it is an endless effort when it comes to true cross-platform solutions like OpenPKG. And beside faster updates in case of security issues (because you don't have to rebuild the application) there is no real advantage in practice. The disadvantages (portability issues) fully destroy the advantages. What's the actual engineering issue with dynamic vs static? Is it just that there's too many flavors of dynamic linking? Just curious, not questioning at all. 73 de Jeff __ OpenPKG http://openpkg.org User Communication List openpkg-users@openpkg.org
