| Claims made in the blog post: 1. There's two forks of RPM. According to Wikipedia, this seems to be correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager#Forks 2. Most of the complaints are about RPM's build chain and the bloat included in it. NSS/NSPR: RPM doesn't care about any standard ways of configuring them – nspr-config, pkg-config, LSB default folders, … ) BDB: Needs to be copied into RPM's source tree. RPM doesn't build its python modules (needed by yum etc.) by default. Yum has a hard dependency on sqlitecachec but doesn't declare it. (sqlitecachec is the piece of software from 2010, BTW.) (No idea whether those are accurate.) 3. The gnome comparison is, again, related to the build system: RPM does not check all build- and runtime dependencies before building, you have to determine them by trial and error. (No idea whether this is accurate either.) 4. RPM packages are binary, and to inspect them you either need specialized tools or, well, hex editors. (Also seems to be correct.) This is a marked difference from all competing formats, which are plain text. DEB packages are ar(1) archives with some special files, all ASCII text. Same for Pacman packages (which are tars). 5. I don't think his "package manager wishlist" is unreasonable. A statically compiled package manager that works without any external dependencies is desirable, as it e.g. allows cross-installation from other platforms, and makes the system harder to break with botched updates. 6. Another complaint is the dependency bloat: Why use a mixture of XML text databases (repodata) backed by an SQLite cache (yum) and BDB databases (rpm)? (No idea what's an accurate representation.) Generally, Fefe has been lobbying for less complex, easier to maintain, easier to verify, more resource efficient software for over a decade. His projects – gatling, dietlibc, minit, fgetty … – show it. |