[OM Cooker] Discussions around new packaging formats

Jeff Johnson n3npq at mac.com
Thu Jun 30 10:04:45 EDT 2016


On Jun 27, 2016, at 9:55 AM, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On 2016-06-26 23:17, Maik Wagner wrote:
>> I noticed a couple of discussions on the German Linux News Sites such
>> as heise.de or pro-linux.de that package management is apparently
>> changing. Instead of the rpm/yum or dpkg/apt-get discussions there
>> seem to be some new contenders: Snappy, Flatpack, AppImage etc.
> 
> From where I stand, those things are a major step backward.

I would agree, but for very different reasons. The infrastructure (and complex metadata)
for the new packaging formats is intimately tied to docker/cloud virtualization.

(disclaimer)
There is nothing wrong at all with new "package" formats that "work" with increasingly
common deployments than what rpm/deb (and apt/yum) were designed for. Just its
a very different problem/usage case with the newer package formats.

(aside)
The more exciting news about packaging recently (jmho) is that M$ has
	1) a syscall shim layer to support execution of linux binaries
	2) a collaboration between M$ and Canonical to distribute applications that
	more or less run natively on Windoze.
	3) an effort to use "packages" rather than self extracting binaries on windows 10

I would even go so far as to suggest that there is opportunity for OMA to "work"
on Windoze using perl-URPMI and RPM5. RPM5 (which also builds perl-URPMI)
is already compiling and passing tests (in the case of RPM, I only build perl-URPM to
test portability, not test functionality) using MSYS2 and mingw-w64 and gnulib.

You can find me at <rpm-devel at rpm5.org> if there is any interest in doing a *.rpm
based distribution on Windows 10.

Yes I'm serious. Lord knows that what is passing for "packaging" on Windows 10 is
utterly pathetic (even with the larger looming efforts I mentioned above).

Chocolatey is just barely okay.

73 de Jeff


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