The hot news right out of the oven is that RPM - the famous package manager that is the base of all Red Hat based Linux distribution packages is going to get a shot in the arm. The Fedora project has decided to create an active community around the RPM. Already a wiki for RPM has been setup which details the project goals.
My first foray with Linux was with Red Hat and during the course of time, I learnt to use RPM to install, upgrade and uninstall packages. But once I started using it, I realized that it was not as simple as it looked. For example, if Package A depended on a library in Package B and Package B was not installed on the machine, then RPM refused to install Package A. And if Package B in turn is dependent on a library residing in Package C, then this problem gets repeated down the line. This came to be known popularly as dependency hell. I have always wondered why Red Hat was not bringing changes to RPM and making the lives of the users easier, given that most packages for Red Hat are RPM based packages.
Perhaps the need of the hour is that all Linux distributions support a universal package format with all packages residing in a central repository, which can be shared by all Linux distributions alike. But this scenario looks bleak with Debian having its own dpkg format and Red Hat based distributions having their own RPM based package formats. Atleast there is going to be better inter operability with different Red Hat based Linux distributions in the future as one of the goals of this new project is to work towards a shared code base between SuSE, Mandrake, Fedora and so on. At present, a lot of work in creating packages and maintaining repositories is being repeated over and over. But Fedora's decision breathes new life in the future of RPM and one can hope to see RPM morph into a more efficient, robust package manager with lesser bugs.
Perhaps the need of the hour is that all Linux distributions support a universal package format with all packages residing in a central repository, which can be shared by all Linux distributions alike. But this scenario looks bleak with Debian having its own dpkg format and Red Hat based distributions having their own RPM based package formats. Atleast there is going to be better inter operability with different Red Hat based Linux distributions in the future as one of the goals of this new project is to work towards a shared code base between SuSE, Mandrake, Fedora and so on. At present, a lot of work in creating packages and maintaining repositories is being repeated over and over. But Fedora's decision breathes new life in the future of RPM and one can hope to see RPM morph into a more efficient, robust package manager with lesser bugs.
Some of the initial goals of the new project are going to be as follows :
- Give RPM a full technical review and work towards a shared base.
- Make RPM a lot simpler.
- Remove a lot of existing bugs in the RPM code base.
- Make it more stable.
- Enhance the RPM-Python bindings thus bringing greater interoperability between Python programs and RPM.
