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by eclipseo76 2036 days ago
Reading this I'm glad I'm working on Fedora.: one git per package, one tool to rule them all (fedpkg), one tool to sync them all locally (grokmirror), (relatively) easy global changes through proven packagers who can ask for mass changes before each release. I don't know how I would do it if I had to deal with svn, mercurial or no scm at all. I understand the want of being decentralized but this is being done at the maintainers expense, who are often already stretched thing.
4 comments
core-questions 2036 days ago
So, last time I used Fedora was around 13; at that time it seemed like major changes to how things were configured was a part of every version bump and trying to deploy it to multiple machines was an exercise in frustration as the next release would come along and blow away a lot of hard work and necessitate a redo. Moved away from it and over to Ubuntu where the LTS resulted in less work for me managing labs of machines.

Is it better now? Stabilizing? Anything to actually set it apart that you'd call out specifically as being advantageous for Linux on the desktop?

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yjftsjthsd-h 2036 days ago
Yeah, Fedora stabilized the upgrade process a lot in its twenties, both from what I've heard other people talking about and my own experience pulling a couple of workstations from... I wanna say version 23 to 28? (I switched off for unrelated reasons.) Very usable now.
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CameronNemo 2036 days ago
dnf/RPM is the biggest offender in his benchmarks when it comes to package manager speed. Not only is metadata for a package an order of magnitude larger, the package manager itself works slowly.
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Jasper_ 2036 days ago
Yeah. There have been multiple projects, even from inside Red Hat, to try to switch away from the text-based Berkley DB to any sort of reasonable database ( one example was razor: https://github.com/krh/razor ), but for a variety of reasons, it was never able to be dethroned.
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Conan_Kudo 2036 days ago
This has finally been done with Fedora 33. RPM has changed from Berkeley DB to SQLite: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Sqlite_Rpmdb
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stjohnswarts 2036 days ago
You're using fedora on cloud services and corporate infrastructure?
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ausjke 2036 days ago
except that debian's apt repo style have been there for decades and still worked well, redhat/fedora's pkg and development model instead had changed who knows how many times, and of course the current one is the golden one, until next one arrives that is.
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Conan_Kudo 2036 days ago
The current RPM repository metadata format has existed since Fedora Core 2 in 2004. The build system infrastructure changed to Koji in 2007[1]. The development model has changed exactly once when Fedora switched from CVS to Git in 2009[2].

There have been no significant changes to Fedora packaging model until three years ago, when Modularity was introduced[3] and Pagure was deployed to ease contributions and support building modules[4]. And the modularity concept is primarily used for alternate software streams in Fedora, so the vast majority of Fedora packages don't use this feature.

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureNewBuildSyste...

[2]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Proposal

[3]: https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/

[4]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ArbitraryBranching

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