Ditch RPM in favor of DPKG
Greetings packagers,
I know how important RPM is to the Fedora Project, but it breaks
everything downstream and we'd be better off using DPKG as we should
have from day one.
I'm calling this initiative fedpkg: Fedora Embraces DPKG.
A bit of background here: I build both RPMs and DEBs for $DAYJOB and
until recently my workflow was quite painful because I needed extra steps
between git checkout and git push that involves a VM, because what we
ship as apt is in reality apt-rpm.
It finally got enough on my nerves to locally build the things I needed and
after a month I have already amortized my efforts with the time I save not
having to deal with needless extra hoops.
In order to successfully build debs on Fedora I needed 4 packages that
I'm now submitting for review:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=gnu-config
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=strip-nondeterminism
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=sbuild
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=apt
I need more than reviews here.
Three of those packages are heavy on Perl code, and I'm not a Perl
Monk. I tried to CC perl-sig as per the guidelines [1] (also tried with
the mailing list address) but bugzilla replied kindly:
CC: perl-sig did not match anything
Apt is a mix of C, Perl and C++ code, so I would be reassured if I
could have a C++ co-maintainer too. I'm only a C developer so if
something goes wrong outside of the C realm that would be helpful.
Two of those packages should be runtime dependencies of debhelper.
The current apt package should be renamed to apt-rpm, I will look up
the procedure for that to happen. I understand that when someone sees
they should run "apt-get install foo" somewhere on the web it's
helpful for non-savvy users that this JustWorks(tm) [2], but apt-rpm is
dead upstream and it shouldn't be advertised as apt.
I hope I CC'd everyone that should get this heads up, and hope to find
help for the reviews and co-maintainership. The packaging does nothing
fancy, there are quirks here and there but overall it was rather easy
to put together. And of course I would be happy to help with reviews
too in exchange.
And thanks again to the mock developers, its design is so much better
than either sbuild or pdebuild that I barely have pain points left when it
comes to RPM packaging.
Thanks,
Dridi
[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/Perl/#_perl_sig
[2] I'm not against apt-rpm in the base install for example