[slightly OT] rpm Vs deb [Was: Re: Moblin is dead, Fedora on netbooks?]

[inode0]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 5:08 AM, steve <steve at lonetwin.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 02/16/2010 02:58 PM, Alan Cox wrote:
>>>  (1) Curious about why you say Moblin is dead? I missed the announcement!
>>>
>>>  (2) I'm writing this on a EeePC 1000HA (1GB, 160GB - but I'm using less
>>>  than 20G) running F12 very nicely.
>>
>> Moblin and Maemo are merging to produce one project using the best bits
>> of each to produce a single distro
>>
>>       www.meego.com
>>
> Sorry for hijacking the thread but I wanted to point something out to the fedora
> folk out here who have not yet heard this -- MeeGo intends to use rpm instead of
> deb for package management (yay !).

If after developing for your favorite open source project for years
the company "sponsoring" that project decided tomorrow that it was
merging with another project and you would need to switch to a
different packaging system I suspect your reaction would be different.

> However, there's been a considerable amount of community bashing taking place
> out on the MeeGo mailing list by current Maemo community members who are partial
> to dpkg. A lot of the reasoning goes like this ....
>
> ...rpm has dependency issues ...
> ...rpm is slower than dpkg ...
> ...dpkg is more capable/stable/flexible than rpm ...

While it is true that there is a fair number of silly arguments about
the technical merits of the change, the real problem is that there was
no transparency in the decision process leading to the change. There
was no explanation that I have seen even stating clearly why the
change is being made. I'm guessing it is related to LSB issues and the
decision to have The Linux Foundation direct the project.

Rather than adopting Fedora's package management system what Nokia has
needed from the very beginning of maemo was to adopt Fedora's
community model.

Even if this merger somehow turns out well for its target audience I
think it is a very sad display of the mismanagement of an open source
project.

John