[colug-432] Red Hat and CentOS buddy-up

[R P Herrold]

On Wed, 8 Jan 2014, Eric Floehr wrote:

> I had heard that Fedora was moving from yum to DNF, which is 
> basically a fork of yum that uses the dependency solver from 
> openSUSE (libsolv), but I hadn't heard they are moving away 
> from RPM. What format are they moving to?

I think the principal model to 'hold pieces' will still 
include RPM packages, as they are well defined and fit 
comfortable with the Unix pholisophy.  Compare contra, carring 
around large DWGs with all libraries under a local tree in the 
Apple model.  I do not follow Windows packaging closely enough 
to know how DLL hell was solved as well as it presently seems 
to be, but I expect a strong backend conformance to a spec is 
in play.  FOSS based is not that tidy, and RPMs (or .debs) 
have served well [at LSB and FHS we have recently been 
considering how to best generalize vendor and package 
namespace, particularly in light of 'SCL's from RHT]

But consider the move to cloud, and short lived, pre-built, 
(and often) non-updatable images.  Like any appliance, having 
all the space footprint of carring around a general purpose 
package manager is hard to justify in some cases, and so 
functionally 'dialing back' the manager seems an obvious place 
for improvement.  I spoke with the lead on this at a FUDCON a 
bit over a year ago, and the 'final best' approach had not yet 
emerged.  The churn in 'installable image' generators reflects 
this

-- Russ herrold