On Wed, Nov 05, 2003, Anshuman Kanwar wrote:
> The whole day today, I have been trying to convince management that perhaps
> having everything under one package based enviromnent (read OpenPkg) is a
> good idea, and that it is not earth shattering to move paths around.
>
> The biggest concern I came up against was :
>
> 1) How do you know OpenPkg will be around next year ?
You cannot really _know_ such a thing for an Open Source project the
same way you cannot really know it for a commercial company and its
product, of course. But because OpenPKG is fully(!) Open Source, you can
be sure that even if we would not do it any longer, others would jump
in and take over. The same as for mostly all other larger Open Source
projects on this net. So, for arguing this against your management,
treat OpenPKG equal to other larger Open Source projects, take a
textbook on Open Source (e.g. "Open Source -- Voices from the Open
Source Revolution") and grab out is well-established arguments.
> 2) How will the upgrades to the next version of OpenPkg work ?
Similar to what we already did between 0.9 to 1.0, between 1.0 to 1.1,
between 1.1 and 1.2, and currently between 1.2 and 1.3: you get a new
set of RPMs which form the 2.0 release and you upgrade ("rpm --rebuild"
+ "rpm -Uvh") all your existing/installed packages with the new set. For
those with %config files, you manually solve content conflicts (in case
there are any at all) and that was it. The effective upgrade of a single
OpenPKG instance to a new release is usually a matter of a few hours
only.
> Both valid concerns. Its hard to tell to convince managers that to make open
> source work you have to contribute to it ...at least by using it and testing
> it and validating it.
Sure, but we're already in year 2003 and there are plenty of well
thought out arguments for Open Source flying around. Just pick the one
which is most appropriate for your situation. And also mention the
alternatives: if you have an inhomogeneous setup (not all boxes of the
same platform plus especially some Solaris boxes in it, etc) you have
AFAIK still no _REAL_ alternative to OpenPKG available. Sure, you can do
all yourself manually or use sunfreeware.com or whatever. But IMHO these
are alternatives on a lower level.
> I am sure people here have faced these questions before... Can you suggest
> how I should tackle them ?
By treating OpenPKG as any Open Source project and taking over
the usual Open Source arguments from the classical textbooks.
Ralf S. Engelschall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.engelschall.com
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