Fedora review

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Fri Jul 22 17:51:39 UTC 2005


On 7/22/05, Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com> wrote:
> Instead of a package, could repos make their details available via RSS
> feeds?  You would past an RSS URL into the GUI tool and it would pull
> down the latest details.  

Ugh.. horrid. You are asking a gui that has to be run by root to
scrape configs out of an rss feed. Can you even provide a signed
payload that way? Seems to me you are just re-inventing the wheel
here. Just pull down a package and install it.  Advertising "package
links" via rss feeds is a good idea... but encoding the actual configs
into an rss feed is not a good way to do this.  At the end of the
day.. you are installing config files that really should be managed by
the rpm system just like what the fedora-release package does right
now in Core....which means installing updates via a package. We do it
for fedora-release, we should encourage 3rd parties to use the same
mechanism. rpm -V is a good thing.. lets not invent something that
shortcircuits the ability to verify that the configs you have are
really the configs you are expected to have.

> something, they wouldn't have to roll and release a new package.  The
> GUI could check for repo updates daily, weekly, whatever.

Yeah we could provide all of files from all packages via an rss feed
instead of via rpms.
I'm really not seeing the advantage of providing a new mechanism to
drop configs into a system. Can't people just advertise links to rpms
in the rss feed and have the gui scrape for packages to install?

-jef




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