Fedora without RPM?

[Karl Larsen]

Bill Rugolsky Jr. wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 03:37:15PM +0930, Tim wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 17:58 -0500, Isaac Serafino wrote:
>>     
>>> Is there any way to get and use Fedora without the RPM program or any
>>> RPM packages, for instance, using an alternative package manager, or
>>> compiling everything from the source? 
>>>       
>> I'd have to wonder why you'd want to do that.  You might as well do
>> Linux from scratch, or pick on of the other smaller distros which don't
>> use a package manager.
>>     
>  
> One would like to do that because Fedora's innovation, engineering, and
> QA are very valuable, but RPM [or rather, its "coding in assembly" approach
> used in practice] is obsolete and not suitable in a networked world with
> distributed filesystems, virtualization, and lots of other configuration
> management headache multipliers.  It is possible to hack most RPM specs
> to operate at a much higher level using macros, but the amount of work
> involved is such that converting to a different mechanism is probably
> just slightly more work.
>
> The whole discussion recently regarding multilib and the pain of creating
> separate *-libs subpackaging just makes me laugh/cry: with rPath Conary,
> the packaging system separates tagging, policy, and mechanism.  Executables,
> shared libraries, and configuration files can all be treated differently
> *and* the policy is readily extensible / hookable.  [Conary is not without
> its own warts, but what is?]
>
> There has been work done in Conary to extract tarballs and patches from SRPMS,
>
>    http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary:RPM_Package_Recipe
>
> but I don't know of a mechanism for automatically converting a substantial
> fraction of spec files to Conary recipe format.  In principle, it is
> possible to process the spec file to determine things like patch application
> order, as is done in quilt setup:
>
>    http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/PatchingRPMsWithQuilt
>
> "Vanilla" rpm spec scripts that use %configure, %makeinstall, etc., should
> be rather trivial to convert.
>
> Regards,
>
> 	Bill Rugolsky
>
>   
    I am a person that uses software not available in rpm form. I 
compile the packages after setting up the make files with .configure and 
it works most times but not all. So I have loaded every version of Red 
Hat from 5.2 and Fedora using rpm files and they work very well. I have 
made a couple of rpm files and it is a lot of learning to do one.

    I see no new option that is not just a re-work of apt or even rpm. 
So why change now?



-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.