moblin moves to fedora
July 25, 2008
So, I’ve noticed a bunch of posts saying that they couldn’t believe that moblin’s reason for moving from ubuntu to fedora was the use of rpm vs deb. I’m a little surprised at that. Anyone who has built a deb package recently vs building an rpm package should see the obvious advantages. The learning curve for putting an rpm together is not nearly as steep as it is for debs. Not to mention the patching mechanism.
So, don’t be so surprised at the choice of distros due to the packaging format.
Having said that, I think the ‘always upstream’ mantra that we’ve been chanting in fedora for a while is a pretty good draw. Moblin as a downstream consumer of fedora knows that if they pitch things back to us they’ll likely go up the tree to the right people.
journal/notes 
July 25, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Obviously you haven’t seen .deb version 3 which allows quilt or git patching, nor debhelper 7 or cdbs which make rules files easy – just a couple of lines for a standard autoconfiscated program. Plus .deb’s upgrade support is superior.
The real issue is probably that Ubuntu is a shitty distro to be downstream of unless you use Launchpad, and maybe Debian wasn’t updated often enough for them.
July 25, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Well it isn’t that I don’t quite believe that the choice is being made on those grounds but in a roundabout way I was saying in the grand scheme of things it is stupid that packaging formats actually matter these days.
July 25, 2008 at 9:39 pm
and to add to that – we should be thinking about competing up the stack not at the bottom because Linux will just stagnate if we get stuck on these little insignificant issues.
July 26, 2008 at 12:54 am
Package mgmt is the base of our stack and is very important to the pieces as we go up. How we establish ourselves here makes a big difference up the stack.
I’m glad you think that the work that a lot of us in the package management space is insignificant.
July 26, 2008 at 4:31 am
@James: Come back when .deb finally supports file dependencies and automatic soname dependencies. RPM has supported these for years!
July 26, 2008 at 7:10 am
File dependencies are a misfeature. I think dpkg-shlibdeps (usually wrapped by dh_shlibdeps or cdbs) does automatic soname dependencies, and was recently enhanced to list the earliest version possible if symbols files are available. Which brings me to my point, it’s not just the file format, it’s the policy around it that matters, and ubuntu’s packaging policy is lacking.
July 27, 2008 at 11:42 pm
“File dependencies are a misfeature”
Some people claimed the same thing about triggers. Now Ubuntu seems to have patched dpkg to add it. Interesting times.
July 28, 2008 at 2:45 pm
The patch has been applied upstream. From what I can tell, triggers are an optimisation – rather than rebuild scrollkeeper 50 times during an upgrade, do it once at the end.
July 29, 2008 at 8:49 am
Religion, religion, religion.
This is all about religion, as we’ve seen thousands of times in OS and OSS: “My world is the best, much better than your”.
I’m using Ubuntu, but I think that standardization in package managers will be one of the best things linux community could do. If rpm is widely adopted, then Ubuntu (and the fundamentalists at Debian), should change their mind, be realist and pragmatic. Do what will be the best thing for Linux, non for their religion.
Surely Gnome and KDE have made a lot for each other.
But imagine where Linux desktop will be if starting 2 years ago all the developers worked to the same desktop environment.
And MS thanks and supports all of these religions.
Sorry but I’m too pragmatic for religion.
So, if really Intel chosen Fedora for rpms, for standards, then I can’t see anything wrong in that.
December 26, 2008 at 5:25 am
I’m sure nobody cares, but I found out today that dpkg triggers are more advanced than RPM triggers – perhaps the misfeature has been avoided thanks to RPM’s experience?
Back to the topic, to use the analogy from your fedora culture clashes post, Ubuntu is clearly B, Debian is clearly A, Fedora is somewhere in-between, and perhaps Moblin (which is designed for system integrators, not end-users directly) wanted a bit less B and a bit more A?