Blog post about package management (aimed at fedora)

[seth vidal]

On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 09:53 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> 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.

Given the work I did trying to corral the various pkging groups into a
single format for just the metadata - I can say that getting an API out
that group would be like pulling teeth.

When we talked about 2) before the biggest hurdles I recall were:

1. there's a lot of code b/t here and there. Is it worth it?
2. It complicates rescue mode, b/c now either the code has to know how
to talk to both the direct sources and the daemon or we have to use (and
maintain) different tools.
3. great ANOTHER daemon running, how lovely.

-sv