RPM roadmapping

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 15:40 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>> Hey all,
>>
>> I know I'm opening up Pandoras box here but what the heck, it's Friday and
>> I'm feeling slightly bored...
>
>> 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?
>
> * A usable c/c++-API.
> The current one is scattered with anachronisms and historic artifacts.

Heh, no s*** :) To quote Jeff (from memory so exact wording may differ): 
"There are (at least) three ways to open rpmdb, none of which take path as 
argument. RPM API is so baroque..."

And yes, cleaning up the API is one of rpm.org roadmap items, has been 
from the start.

> * Usable API docs.
> The current ones don't qualify as such.

Yup. And what's actually useful in the current ones gets lost in the noise 
of historic junk that's not supposed to be used etc...

> * Buildable rpm sources.
> I don't know if you meanwhile cleaned up the rpm.org repo, but last time
> I checked, it was not even close to be buildable.

A fair bit of work has gone to cleaning up the build, practically all of 
the compiler warnings (no less than ~650 of them when I started) from core 
rpm code are gone and the auto*stuff has seen a bit of work too: "make 
distcheck" now works and rpm itself can now be built with using %configure 
macro. Lots of work remains before the build can be called "clean" though.

BTW Ralf, if you have any interest at all, your auto*tool expertise
would be very, very much appreciated at rpm.org.

 	- Panu -