[Fwd: porting fai to rpm distributions: s/apt/smartpm/g?]

[Henning Sprang]

Just forwarded for completeness of this discussion one linux-fai-devel


-------- Forwarded Message --------
> From: Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net>
> Reply-To: linux-fai <linux-fai at uni-koeln.de>
> To: linux-fai <linux-fai at uni-koeln.de>
> Subject: porting fai to rpm distributions: s/apt/smartpm/g?
> Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2005 12:24:20 +0200
> Hi,
> 
> I've been discussing with Henning^2 on what is needed to port fai to
> rpm-based distributions (my personal target is RHEL). It looks like
> the main distribution specific tasks to solve are to prepare the base
> chroot and the use of the depsolver. I have already played with fcopy
> in kickstart's %post scripts, and was very pleased to see my Red Hat
> going classes :)
> 
> Preparing the base chroot is probably the easier part. I'm a bit
> worried about the depsolver.
> 
> Currently fai uses apt, which does perform OK and is Debian's
> depsolver tool of choice. I've been an apt-rpm fan for quite some
> years now, but I see the project aging and not being maintainable
> anymore (at least the apt-rpm port).
> 
> Other than a couple of apt bugs that can be worked around there is the
> problem of apt not handling multilib systems properly (this is package
> system independent). This means that apt cannot cope with multiple
> instance of the same package (name) but with different
> architectures. E.g. apt will not accept a glibc package for i386 and
> x86_64 on the same box. This has rather killed apt as the preferred
> depsolver in distributions shipping mixed 32/64 bit systems like Red
> Hat/Fedora for instance.
> 
> Now, this is not a suggestion to start a multiple backend architecture
> for fai to support apt-dpkg, apt-rpm, yum, up2date and
> whatever. Instead I thing the solution is already there in the form of
> the smart package manager (already in Sarge):
> 
> 		  http://smartpm.org/
> 
> It works with deb, rpm (and even slackware packages) and can plug to
> all major repo formats, from Debian's apt-deb , over rpm's apt-rpm,
> metadata, urpmi etc. It does abstrahize all package format details
> from the user.
> 
> It can also be used to initiate and populate chroots, which would be
> quite helpful for creating the different base.tgzs.
> 
> The drawback is that replacing apt with smart in fai could be a
> non-trivial task. Although smart has kept the typical parts of apt's
> cli, fai uses apt's perl bindings, something which does not exist for
> smart (smart is writen in python BTW).
> 
> Nevertheless, I wanted to drop this idea in this forum and make some
> propaganda about smart. smart could be a good idea for fai/debian even
> w/o thinking about portability, but it would be a vital step to
> unleash fai onto the rpm world, too.</propaganda>
> 
> smart is currently in Debian Sarge, but if you want to give it a test,
> please use the version in Edge, as the one in Sarge is already quite
> outdated. Not relevant for fai's purposes, but smart even comes with a
> synaptic-like GUI.
-- 
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