On Tue, Dec 14, 2004, R. P. Channing Rodgers, M.D. wrote: > Thanks for your email, and your interest in our work. You have put your > finger squarely on an important issue. Our paper was an attempt to outline > what needed to be done to merge the best features of RPM and depot, which > we firmly believe would yield the best current platform for managing locally > installed software. We worked with the folks at UT/ARL to improve the depot > scripts they had written to support multiple servers, and better manage > name collisions, among other things. I entered into a lengthy email exchange > with some of the OpenPKG developers at the time, trying to interest them in > working with us to merge RMP and depot conventions, but the discussions > faltered > when it became evident that they simply were not interested. The situation is > this: RPM is really tailored to an individual machine (though one could mount > its files to other hosts via NFS, that is not at all the same thing as what > depot is doing). Depot's weaknesses are twofold: name collisions and how to > handle them (RPM has the same problem) and the lack of formal dependency > checking (which RPM deals with, but, one could argue, non-optimally). One > solution would be to build dependency checking into depot using a system such > as Alva Couch's "sowhat" software. Being a very small group, we have not had > the time to take this on, and my guess is that the OpenPKG folks are so > heavily > committed to their current approach that they are not likely to be interested > in the problem. I will forward a copy of this note to the OpenPKG > developers list and to Michael Schloh von Bennewitz, as perhaps this is a good > time to re-open our dialog. I have great respect for what the OpenPKG folks > have been doing, but still think the community could benefit from merging > the best aspects of depot and RPM. Best wishes to you and your colleagues > in finding a workable solution, and I hope we can stay in touch with respect > to this important practical problem... > Hello Rick,
Your depot system is interesting indeed. With all the development ideas waiting for us to research or implement, depot and even many other equally important topics fall beneath the priority limit. Not ideal. I'm glad that you will keep us informed about depot and your thoughts on OpenPKG, however. Dependency tracking is indeed a problem for us as well, even though RPM provides a rudimentary mechanism. We've had problems (still do?) with NFS locking as well. These and other similarities between depot and OpenPKG would be nice to solve both at once, and of course many nonintersecting features would benefit both systems as well if crossimplemented. I'm afraid that in the coming weeks that's as involved as I can be on such possibilities. A release scheduled for February is already keeping us busy. Regards, Michael
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