RPM roadmapping

[Panu Matilainen]

Hey all,

I know I'm opening up Pandoras box here but what the heck, it's Friday and 
I'm feeling slightly bored...

With RPM 4.4.2.1 fresh out and 4.4.x branched off to maintenance mode, 
time to start looking forward to next major release. While the focus will 
be largely in cleaning up and streamlining the codebase, it can't 
realistically be all about just that.

Not everybody is on rpm-maint list and we'd like to hear the wishes of 
(Fedora) developers/packagers too. So: what have you always wanted to do 
with rpm, but wasn't able to? Or the other way around: what you always 
wished rpm would do for you? What always annoyed you out of your mind?

Just to kick off the discussion (like it was necessary, this is rpm 
afterall...), here are a few things that have been brought up in various 
forums and private discussions, but don't feel constrained by these items, 
they're just some examples of what's being considered:

* Improving automatic dependency extraction
   - Plugin architecture for internal dependency extractor to avoid having
     to patch rpm itself for each new language
   - libtool, pkgconfig requires + provides (easily ported from rpm5.org)
   - <your favorite language> (python for me) library requires +
     provides discovery
   - Buildrequires match cross-arch on multilib, not good
   - -devel package dependencies match cross-arch on multilib, not good

* Python bindings
   - Ever wanted to fully drive a package build from python, without
     having to resort to screenscraping rpmbuild output etc? I know I
     have...

* Unix philosophy - do just one thing and do it well:
   - RPM is not a GPG key manager but a package manager.
   - RPM is not an ftp/http client, it's a package manager.

The more specific you can be, the better - "make it not suck" isn't 
productive. Of course there's no way everything can be done, we want the 
next major release out before end of the decade... Also this is not a 
voting where most votes guarantee implementation, but consider it your 
chance to be heard. I'm listening... :)

 	- Panu -