improving rpm

[Jane Dogalt]

--- Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> rpm has served us well, as have the tools that have grown around it (yum,
> smart, etc.).
> ...
> 1) Don't create needless .rpmsave/.rpmnew if there is no change
> 2) Attempt to merge changes, in the manner of a modern revision control
> system.

As mentioned, 1 is a bug, but for 2-

I vote for a very simple method, of not changing the important current
behaviour, but just adding the creation of .rpmpatch files, and then adding a
tool to post facto help the user with the manual merge (somewhat akin to gentoo
reference).

I.e.

rpm -Uvh [--interactive] foo.rpm
(or if no --interactive, then after the fact-
rpm --mergeconfig foo

Which would then throw up text or gui dialogs alerting the user to unmerged
config changes, and then bringing up a tool like meld(aka xxdiff).

What this seems to boil down to is a common sysadmin process, which currently
is left up to the user, instead of being streamlined and documented.  Mind you,
an argument could be made for leaving around the presumption that sysadmins
ought to be expected to know all the constituent parts.  But still, I wouldn't
mind if rpm created the patch for me, and then prodded me along the process of
invoking meld.

To ramble on further- this evokes the difference between apt/dpkg and rpm,
whereby dpkg stupidly doesn't always hold to the maxim 'default installs are
preconfigured with sane default configurations'.  However, I think the best
would be a merging of the two, and the addition to rpm of "rpm --configure foo"
which would invoke some %config script from the rpm specfile, which would
invoke the configuration tool for the package.  Then somehow combining that
diff/patch/merge business into the configuration tool for each package, would
be some work, but it would be pretty cool.

Just rambling...

-jdog


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