What's after OpenLinux?

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, Mar 09, 2003 at 10:37:52AM +0100, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
...
>
>The problem is that RPM limits itself to the package in question. emerge
>takes the next step and defines the relationship between packages. And,
>instead of just stopping and saying "something is missing so bugger off
>and sort that out and don't return until you do", as rpm will do, emerge
>takes action and gets the missing things. It is the admittance that no
>package is an island that makes emerge work. 

RPM maintains dependency information, particularly well implemented in the
source RPMS in the openpkg system.  They have a script that generates an
XML file with dependency information as well as from parsing the package's
spec files to gather information on options selected during the build
process.  This file can then be used to update in much the same manner as
the FreeBSD ports and various non-RPM Linux systems as well.

The problems are very different when one is maintaining a small number of
systems as opposed to supporting a large number of systems which may well
not all be on the same base platform.  Using a package management system
that's totally independent of the distribution's simplifies life
considerably.  Using openpkg I no longer have to worry about breaking the
distribution's update systems or conflicts within their systems.

Given the volatility of Linux distributions over the years, I want the
things we do to be as independent of the underlying distribution as
possible.  This is most important when doing servers where we don't want to
have to worry about where things are on different systems (ever maintained
apache and all its supporting modules on multiple systems?).  Using
openpkg, it makes little difference whether we're running on SuSE,
Mandrake, Red Hat, or FreeBSD.  Moving to a new distribution is usually a
matter of rebuilding on the new system from the standard SRPMS.

Bill
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