Notes on the RULE installers and packaging, was: Fedora Mini - mini RPM

M. Fioretti mfioretti at mclink.it
Thu Apr 7 03:38:20 UTC 2005


Greetings, everybody.

I am the RULE project coordinator.  I have never formally introduced
myself here because I don't plan to become a regular FC developer, I
just lurk on this list to know what will happen in Fedora. This time,
however, I think I can provide some useful information:

On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 21:32:00 PM +0100, Andy Green (andy at warmcat.com)
wrote:

> Alan Cox wrote:
> | There have been tools like miniconda.

Miniconda was the first RULE installer. It is a patched anaconda and
is NOT maintained anymore by us. The current one is slinky, see
below. Feel of course free to port miniconda to FC4 if you think it
makes sense:

http://www.rule-project.org/article.php3?id_article=36
http://www.rule-project.org/article.php3?id_article=102

> | I've been down this path a bit and you hit a single fundamental
> | near-insoluble problem - up2date/yum/rpm. They burn resources and
> | need some major rework at the rpm level

One generic comment on this: even if someone rewrote from scratch the
whole up2date/yum or apt4rpm/ rpm chain, I do NOT think it would help
on limited systems: it would just tell you much faster that you can't
install because you have no disk space.

The package management system can do little when the code of an
application was originally written (or sometimes packaged later) to
require any other package in sight to just use one or two files from
it, and that other package has the same limit.

When we started RULE I looked into some ways to automatically spot out
the worst/heavier packages and package sets from this point of view,
but frankly had not enough skills. I would *really* like to cooperate
with some real developer on this. Basically, apt, yum and friends just
tell you "don't worry, I will fill the HD with possibly unnecessary
packages without wasting your time". I would like to see/help with the
development of something like the DAN I tried to do back then:

http://www.rule-project.org/article.php3?id_article=32

> Busybox has a really really minimal core re-implementation of
> rpm/cpio.

Yes, this is how slinky, the current RULE installer works. It uses
busybox and its rpm to install the real rpm, and then the latter to
pull in manually crafted package lists. Originally, DAN was supposed
to generate these lists automatically at each new distro release.

Again, I think something like DAN would help a LOT also with packaging
and maintenance of standard FC, so it would be great to work on it.

Anyway, the current RULE installer is shortly explained here:

http://www.rule-project.org/article.php3?id_article=50

FC3 versions are here
http://www.rule-project.org/download/fedora_core_3/slinky/

and their description is in this announcement:
http://www.rule-project.org/breve.php3?id_breve=19

Slinky is the only one we are working on. Help on it and/on DAN is
really welcome!!

Ciao,
	Marco Fioretti

-- 
Marco Fioretti                    mfioretti, at the server mclink.it
Fedora Core 3 for low memory      http://www.rule-project.org/

Do not ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by
stupidity.                 Physicist Richard Feynmann, Nobel Prize 




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