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OpenMandriva Switching Back From RPM5 To RPM4

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  • #21
    Originally posted by varikonniemi View Post
    So what is wrong with RPM5 that it has not got adopted in so many years?
    RPM5 is not maintained anymore (at latest often), and this causing issues with packing and build process and also resolving dependencies. With every new year, this task is harder and harder. So they switch back to still maintained RPM4, because with this many issues just gone.

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    • #22
      If RPM5 is a mere fork of RPM4 it is deceptive to call it that. If it was actually RPM5 then no-one would maintain RPM4 since RPM5 was the next version the authors worked on. (like no-one works on gnome2 because they moved to gnome3)

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      • #23
        Originally posted by varikonniemi View Post
        If RPM5 is a mere fork of RPM4 it is deceptive to call it that. If it was actually RPM5 then no-one would maintain RPM4 since RPM5 was the next version the authors worked on. (like no-one works on gnome2 because they moved to gnome3)
        Ah! Wish this distinction was mentioned in the article.

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        • #24
          a distro that focus on reduce bloat that's very nice to see and rare to see these days

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          • #25
            This is all part of a greater movement to share resources between distros with rpm4 and dnf, along with a set method of packaging guidelines among the rpm based distros. Mageia has done something similar I have seen a push with PCLinuxOS as well (believe it or not). I see a lot of good coming from this, especially for the smaller based rpm distros. JBJ (old RPM 4, current RPM 5 maintainer) was always hard to work with.. it was his way or the highway, I'm surprised it took them this long to switch back to RPM 4, especially since a majority of the great features that RPM 5 touted, RPM 4 has had similar features now for a while and what RPM 4 doesn't can be macro'd, or added in some way outside the code base. RPM 4 is community driven, where as RPM 5 was Jeff Johnson driven.
            Last edited by jmiahman; 07 March 2018, 06:27 PM.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by droste View Post

              Originally posted by andreano View Post
              The obligatory question:

              Why not zypper?

              Unless dnf has caught up since fedora 25, zypper is clearly better from a user's point of view. On the surface, dnf seems like the next most pointless project ever (after Mir of course) … maybe I would know better if I knew the answer to my question.

              Well DNF makes sense as a replacement for yum as it keeps the same command line parameters (mostly) and it uses libsolv which is the same library zypper uses.
              Why you would choose DNF instead of zypper on a distro that didn't have yum before, that's a good question :-)
              Well, hello again! I think I've seen at least one of you before (hint, back when Phoronix was talking about Mageia using DNF)!

              As I'm one of the folks helping in implementing this in OpenMandriva, I can speak to the reasons why we chose it.

              A part of it is due to the convergence around libsolv-based software managers in the RPM world. All three major RPM-based Linux distributions now use or offer one. Fedora and openSUSE use one by default (Fedora with DNF, openSUSE with Zypper). Mageia currently defaults to urpmi, but is planning to switch to DNF for the next release. The big task is porting the installer, which is slowly ongoing (Perl + Python experts welcome to help!)...

              Like Mageia, OpenMandriva has a lot of tools written in Perl and Python (and they even have some Ruby!), so the extensibility and useful API were both meaningful advantages. A couple of things have changed since the Mageia decision which pushes DNF even further ahead over Zypper and over most other package managers:
              • There is now dnfdragora as a DE/GUI-agnostic frontend to DNF, providing Qt 5, GTK+3, and ncurses UIs for the package manager. It has even replaced Yumex in Fedora.
              • DNF can be used to trivially do foreign architecture OS image bootstrap. This is critical as OpenMandriva uses user-mode emulation of non x86 architectures for building those packages. And doing clean builds without a feature like that is much harder (and more expensive!).
              In addition, DNF has now been adopted by Fedora, Mageia, and Yocto. It is also available for openSUSE (Leap 15.0 and Tumbleweed) and CentOS 7 (as "yum4"). It is practically guaranteed to be part of RHEL8 / CentOS 8, though in what form, I don't know.

              And finally, DNF development is all in the open on GitHub, with a responsive and friendly development team.

              Originally posted by szymon_g View Post
              I see nothing wrong with zypper.
              while no package manager is perfect, i find zypper to be the nicest. Fast, reliable and has a "zypper ps" command
              DNF actually the basic zypper ps equivalent in dnf needs_restarting. It has a more advanced variant with the tracer plugin (from the dnf-plugins-extras-tracer package).

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