Thetargos
2006-09-05, 11:30 AM CDT
This is the title of an article (http://lwn.net/Articles/196523/) I got from mugshot (http://www.mugshot.org), and despite the tone it is written in, I think it does make some valid points and asks some valid questions about the status of RPM and the relation with the upstream relationship between RedHat/Fedora and the development team. Apparently (or so points out the article) everything boils down to a single person who has a really bad temper, and even some Red Hat people has stated that there is a FORK of RPM.
As you may or may not know, RPM was originally developed at Red Hat and called "Red Hat Package Manager", at some point Red Hat decided to give control of the tool over to the community in the spirit of Open Source, so it was called "RPM Package Manger" (you know how FLOSS projects LOVE auto acronyms :p ). In any case, The article does make mention of the fact that RPM has become a critical piece for Linux standards, not because it is widely used by many, many distros, but because it is required of a distro to provide RPM to be LSB compliant. And as you know LSB stands for Linux Standard Base, which in turn makes of RPM quite an important peice of the Linux puzzle towards standarization.
I actually thought that the major distributons which had made RPM their core package manager, would have been involved with the upstream project in some way or another, like it is the case with the kernel, where a lot (and I mean a LOT) of patches are submited by many distributions to the upstream development team. In this case, however apparently this is not the case, as the distributions modify "in house" the version of RPM they choose to use. This and the fact that neither Red Hat nor Fedora have upgraded release versions of RPM within a single version of their distributions. There have been RPM updates, true, but those are of the same release as the distribution was shipped with. What I mean is that even when the current version of RPM is 4.4.5, Fedora Core 5 (even when it will still receive updates when Core 6 comes around) will still use RPM 4.4.2, the only numbers that change are those which follow the main version, for instance 4.4.2-14 and currently we have 4.4.2-15, so what this probably means is that either a consensus is reached and/or a govern body will have to take control over RPM (or rather the forked version).
I don't know you guys, but this situation reminds me way too much of what happened with XFree86 and Xorg, even though the change back then was due to a change in licensing.
As you may or may not know, RPM was originally developed at Red Hat and called "Red Hat Package Manager", at some point Red Hat decided to give control of the tool over to the community in the spirit of Open Source, so it was called "RPM Package Manger" (you know how FLOSS projects LOVE auto acronyms :p ). In any case, The article does make mention of the fact that RPM has become a critical piece for Linux standards, not because it is widely used by many, many distros, but because it is required of a distro to provide RPM to be LSB compliant. And as you know LSB stands for Linux Standard Base, which in turn makes of RPM quite an important peice of the Linux puzzle towards standarization.
I actually thought that the major distributons which had made RPM their core package manager, would have been involved with the upstream project in some way or another, like it is the case with the kernel, where a lot (and I mean a LOT) of patches are submited by many distributions to the upstream development team. In this case, however apparently this is not the case, as the distributions modify "in house" the version of RPM they choose to use. This and the fact that neither Red Hat nor Fedora have upgraded release versions of RPM within a single version of their distributions. There have been RPM updates, true, but those are of the same release as the distribution was shipped with. What I mean is that even when the current version of RPM is 4.4.5, Fedora Core 5 (even when it will still receive updates when Core 6 comes around) will still use RPM 4.4.2, the only numbers that change are those which follow the main version, for instance 4.4.2-14 and currently we have 4.4.2-15, so what this probably means is that either a consensus is reached and/or a govern body will have to take control over RPM (or rather the forked version).
I don't know you guys, but this situation reminds me way too much of what happened with XFree86 and Xorg, even though the change back then was due to a change in licensing.