Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Orion Poplawski]

On 09/11/2015 08:58 PM, Reindl Harald wrote:
>
> Am 12.09.2015 um 04:49 schrieb Adam Williamson:
>> On Sat, 2015-09-12 at 04:46 +0200, Reindl Harald wrote:
>>>
>>> Am 11.09.2015 um 23:54 schrieb Orion Poplawski:
>>>> I would argue that we need to be packaging much less than we do.
>>>>   Many
>>>> languages have developed packaging infrastructures around
>>>> themselves and
>>>> perhaps it's time to let those become the primary means of
>>>> distributing such
>>>> software
>>>
>>> no, thanks, one time the mess with CPAN installed packages mixed
>>> with
>>> the OS and clean that up was enough while it's way more maintainable
>>> over dist-upgrades to package the missing perl modules to get net-
>>> dri
>>> running for years now
>>>
>>> having parallel worlds of software management ends in a mess on
>>> systems
>>> not re-installed every now and then - i maintain 30 productin
>>> machines
>>> installed 2008 and upgraded with yum - that's possible because one
>>> central package management
>>
>> perl and python are examples of languages whose packaging mechanisms
>> have been designed with system-wide installation / distribution
>> packaging broadly kept in mind. For other languages/ecosystems this is
>> not the case; they are expressly designed around bundling
>
> and even if it works somehow - have fun to replicate a setup on
> different machines - with one central package manager just "rpm -q" is
> your friend and you can easily build your own meta-packages doing
> nothing else than define Requires and stuck them together
>
> that would not be possible in a clean way having to deal with dozens of
> different install tools, some of them downloading things directly from
> uptream, frankly you can' even be sure you end in the same versions 2
> hours later, with RPM packages and repos nothing easier than setup a
> internal cache-repo from /var/cache/yum and have on all other machines
> in the network *only* that enabled - i am doing that from the very first
> moment of setup production machines, the production servers *never*
> touched any Fedora or other external repo over 7 years

Oh I certainly won't argue that it's easier for the end user/admin to 
work with one tool.  Although we are getting better tools: ansible, 
puppet, et. al. offer the ability to install and track packages with 
other tools like pip/gem/etc, though I admit to not having tried doing 
that specific thing yet.

But if we're in a situation where we are just killing ourselves 
shoehorning upstream's mess of bundled requirements into rpms and their 
response is just 'well just run "pip install foo" and be done with it', 
I think it's time to just let everyone do that.  Then maybe we can see 
if that is the way to software install nirvana or if admins start 
complaining about not being able to maintain their systems in a rational 
way.  We can then point these latter folks upstream and say this is what 
these folks wanted you to do, talk to them about it.

-- 
Orion Poplawski
Technical Manager                     303-415-9701 x222
NWRA/CoRA Division                    FAX: 303-415-9702
3380 Mitchell Lane                  orion at cora.nwra.com
Boulder, CO 80301              http://www.cora.nwra.com