A word on package management

J French me at semitekie.com
Sat May 26 07:17:47 UTC 2007


Package management could be greatly sped up if the header files were 
split into two separate files, one containing only the package's 
version, dependencies and conflicts and the other containing all of the 
information that people don't normally look at (license, author, 
changelog, etc)

Realistically speaking, all of the other package information could be 
gained by someone who cares to read it with something like "yum viewinfo 
thepackage". Some changes to createrepo and yum itself would probably 
make implementation of this rather simple.

On the subject of licenses, at least the GPL should exist in an RPM by 
itself and be a dependency of all packages covered under that license. 
The same could be done for other licenses as well and this would ensure 
the end user had a copy on system. Of course, this would require a bit 
of work by the package management team as the dependency would need to 
be added to all of those package. Even better, the proper license RPM 
could be dictated by the License field already in those files.

Thoughts?

-Jeremy




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