Blog post about package management (aimed at fedora)

[Bill Nottingham]

Richard Hughes (hughsient at gmail.com) said: 
> I've blogged about package management in Fedora (and how it sucks in
> other distros too) and also discussed abstract per-system package
> management over DBUS interfaces.
> 
> I would appreciate feedback on
> http://hughsient.livejournal.com/31429.html either on the blog as
> comments, personal email, or just cc'd to the list.

We've actually discussed this before. Basically, with the current
state of yum-updatesd:

1) we could make it dumber. Dead simple; doesn't have modes to install
updates, etc. All it does is check for new metadata - it's possible
that it doesn't even check it against what you have installed. Simple ==
predictable.

2) we could make it smarter. A full package management system - all tools
run unpriveleged and simply call into it. This is more along the lines
of what you suggested, albeit tied solely to RPM/yum.

Frankly, I don't care as much about it working with .deb, or Solaris
pkgadd, or whatever. Others may differ, but I wonder if the effort required
to coerce all of them to a common API would a) be sanely possible b)
leave you with enough of a common API to do anything useful.

Bill