RPM roadmapping

[Dimi Paun]

On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 15:40 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> Or the other way around: what you always 
> wished rpm would do for you? What always annoyed you out of your mind?

  * Version control the meta-information
    This can't be efficiently done outside RPM, and it would provide
    an administrator with an invaluable tool (say a malfunction starts
    at about 4am):
      - what packages changes are different from yesterday?
      - what files have changed for package foo between version V and W?
      - what's the history of package foo on this system?
    Not very difficult, but quite useful. Every time something breaks
    on a system (usually via an automatic yum update) I would kill
    for the ability to run such queries.
  * Ability to save a pristine copy for the configuration files
    This would make it a _lot_ simpler to integrate the new .rpmnew
    files, in a lot of cases being as simple as:
        diff foo.pristine foo | patch -o foo foo.rpmnew
    At the very least to provide some sort of mechanism that would
    permit an external trigger to so easily and efficiently.

This maybe already implemented (never checked in depth the transaction
triggers), but a mechanism for external tools to hook into the
transactions would be great. More generally, the external triggers must
be given enough information about the current transaction to be able to
know the delta that the transaction introduces without having to scan
the entire state of the system. As a litmus test, you should be able to
implement the version control idea mentioned above via this mechanism
easily and efficiently. 

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.