[Mageia-dev] RPM5 AND MAGEIA

Tue Mar 8 19:11:26 CET 2011

2011/3/3 Buchan Milne <bgmilne at staff.telkomsa.net>:
+>
+> ----- "devzero2000" <devzero2000 at rpm5.org> wrote:
+>> Apart from the rest - of which i will ask for sponsorship when it
+>> will
+>> be - I wanted to know if there are plans to move to rpm5 by Mageia,
+>> such as Mandriva has been doing lately.
+>
+>
+>> Rpm5 already has a builtbot
+>> with Magela and rpm5. I can, if you can think useful or have plan for
+>> this, lay the necessary modification to enter into rpm5 Mageia, with
+>> the features of Mandriva cooker - fingerprint, syslog, etc. without
+>> trademark ecc- and produce a first rpm rpm5 for mageia , which also
+>> contains the functionality required by the passage to the "RPM
+>> ACID " feauture (berkeley db conversion)
+>
+> But, can you:
+> -ensure that all valid packages that build under rpm-4.x (e.g. in Mandriva 2010.x) will build under rpm5?
+> -ensure that all valid packages that install under rpm-4.x will install under rpm-4.x?
+No and no (I'm assuming you mean "install under rpm5 will install
+under rpm-4.x").
+Such guarantees has never been provided with any other rpm versions
+either and would effectively prevent the possibility of doing any
+serious development
+and improvement on rpm itself and packaging.
+
+There's a reason for having backports and why we don't even try aiming
+at such goals either.
+
+If able to give any such guarantees with rpm.org on Mageia you gotta be
+either stupid, insane or a damn liar! ;p
+
+The guarantees and priorities is as always:
+* legacy compatibility for older packages
+(opposed to future compatibility gets kinda hard with the the whole
+time travelling issue and limitations attached to it making future
+hard to reliably
+define;)
+*  backportability of current packages
+packages needs to be adapted to follow current policies, practice, functionality
+etc. in the current distribution, while efforts in ensuring
+possibility of backports
+needs to be invested in the packaging and adopting along the way rather than
+keep adapting rpm to stay compatible with the packaging which gets rather
+backwards.
+
+Very few changes results in breakage for backports, and where it happens it's
+easy enough to add conditional behaviour, nothing new forcing any real changes
+in long-established practices here..
+Much of the same breakages and issues you hit, you'll hit just as well in newer
+versions from rpm.org as well..
+>
+> There is no document specifying what has changed, or even when highlighting changes, no-one (@rpm5.org, or @mandriva.com) has bothered to list them so that contributors can save time instead of troubleshooting breakage.
+>
+> Some issues that have impacted me so far:
+> -changed behaviour of %exclude
+Ambiguity on %exclude usage is a clear bug, %exclude which is solely
+intended for
+excluding files from a specific package (rather than from being packaged at all.
+removing files at end of %install already fit this purpose
+sufficiently, which should
+make it obvious to most people with understanding of doing technical designs in
+general that wiring already existing functionality into an existing
+function with
+different functionality wouldn't make sense. Also this bug was fixed
+since in later
+releases such as 4.4.6 & 4.4.8 shipped before the rpm.org change, and should
+rather be treated as a regression.) predates the unpackaged files check and
+should *not* be used for other purposes.
+Fixing this is in packaging is *very* trivial and fully backwards
+compatible, not
+fixing this OTOH breaks compatibility.
+> -new reserved macros (%sql)
+all new macros introduced has the potential of conflicting with others
+and should
+always be fixed, it being reserved is more a benefit IMO as it prevents such
+incidents to go unnoticed (using very generic naming for macros is a bad
+practice in general anyways)..
+fixing this does not break any compatibility either ;)
+> -possible race condition between %__os_install_post and processing of %files (.lzma man pages reported missing where they are in fact .xz)
+your own packaging mistake independent of rpm version, explained on
+cooker and fixed for you already ;)
+>
+> (and of course, the unavailability of the build system - during one of the periods I had the most time to work on packages - due to the rpm5 "upgrade")
+>
+> rpm5 has wasted more than half of the time I could afford to contribute to Mandriva. It seems Mandriva has resources to waste, I don't think we have.
+you gotta put short-term and long-term effects up against eachother. breakages
+were already expected long before starting the upgrade, and the
+majority of these
+were actually rather in various tools etc. related to rpm rather than
+in rpm itself.
+The existing situation made it hard to maintain and do development of
+rpm in distribution,
+packaging and on a the various tools due to being left with since-long
+unmaintained
+tools used (ie. the older version of the perl bindings that only mandriva
+uses and that has been rewritten from scratch since and actively maintained
+upstream as well) and having to keep work around it and moving further
+and further away from "standard" rpm packaging by keep introducing any new
+functionality, scripts, macros etc. as distro specific and harder to collaborate
+with others on..
+
+You gotta break a few eggs..
+Issues hit in Mandriva gets fixed along the way in both cooker and upstream
+in parallel, making extremely few of them of any big concerns for other to
+worry about later.
+Maintenance and development of various tools, packaging etc. and dealing with
+your existing and future issues experienced is something you'll be left to deal
+with alone though..
+Considering the *major* amount of time and work invested in r&d historically
+always being on Mandriva's end with almost all developers employed to
+work on it full time. The harsh reality of trying to keep this up with only a
+few of these working on it during their limited spare time should be obvious..
+You're entitled to the freedom of not showing any interest in sharing efforts on
+any of these things (and for yourself to blame;), at least you're made aware of
+competence, skills, interest and resources that's been offered and is still
+available to you. :)
+
+
+>
+> (At present, I am not sure if I will continue to maintain packages in Mandriva, the ones where I need newer packages on non-Mandriva at work which I currently maintain in Mandriva and then rebuild I will maintain for the present, but ones I don't need for work may languish ...)
+
+(Sorry for slow reponse and late reply..:/)
+--
+Regards,
+Per Øyvind
+