Boot speedup with readahead

[Ville Skyttä]

On Tuesday 09 September 2008, Jeremy Katz wrote:

> It really boils down to the fact that
> the Fedora package manager is yum.  If users of other package managers
> want to get their package manager to do similar things, we won't stop
> them -- but trying to make everything work for such a small minority is
> going to be increasingly difficult.

It's not really about _making_ everything work everywhere I'm worried about.  
It's about people seemingly being very eager to _move_ existing, working 
functionality to yum or its plugins when someone finds a case that could be 
optimized by doing that, and dropping the existing generic 
functionality.  "We won't stop them to make their favourite package manager 
to do similar things" does not really cover it at all well, it's closer to 
actively making things harder for them.

Keeping other package manager (including plain rpm) users in mind does not 
mean that time should be invested to make everything work for them as well as 
the optimized case does for yum users.  It's very much enough to just not 
drop the existing functionality and do the yum-optimized cases so that they 
play nice together with that.  With the right mindset, I don't think that's 
going to be at all difficult to do in the vast majority of cases.

Just a couple of examples from this thread: readahead and prelink 
updates/re-runs.  Both are things that should Just Work out of the box even 
without any package manager (even rpm!) installed.   

If I misunderstood and the optimized cases are meant to be done so that 
they're just optimized for yum users, and the existing generic functionality 
is preserved for others, then no worries.

Oh, and by the way, after trying to use yum for several distro versions, 
always eventually failing and switching to some alternative for various 
reasons until now, I haven't even tried other package managers than yum 
during the time I've used F-9.  I still find myself disagreeing with some 
things and run into some bugs every now and then, but at this point I think 
overall it's the best depsolver I've used on Fedora.