[gentoo-dev] app-arch/rpm - a few questions

[Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky@gentoo.org>]

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I recently took rpm under my wing and I plan to update it a bit. There
is already 4.8.0 masked in tree for testing (go ahead and try if you
want, just backup your package db beforehand). I have a few questions
for the list though...I would assume a big portion of Gentoo users don't
come into contact with rpms that often.

>=rpm-4.7 introduced certain changes to rpm files created by them which
makes some features unavailable when using older rpm versions. Would you
consider this a problem (in other words: are you creating rpms with
gentoo and use them someplace else)? 4.7 was released over a year ago so
I would say most major rpm-based distributions already support those new
features.

A bigger question I have for the list is this: We currently have two
completely different versions of rpm as one package. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager#Forks for overview of
situation.

app-arch/rpm-5* is horse of a different color from 4.* branch yet it
still resides in app-arch/rpm. rpm-5* is hard masked since 2008, and it
is not supported by any big players (Novell, Red Hat and Mandriva all
use rpm-4.* fork). Question is...what to do with it. I could move it to
app-arch/rpm5 (a bit weird to have package with only one ebuild that is
hard-masked I guess) or simply remove. There is no bug filed against
rpm-5, probably because it has been hard-masked all the time. Moreover
if I am not mistaken database is not compatible between 4 and 5 so if
someone accidentally upgrades...he/she is screwed. That was original
reason for masking rpm-5 as far as I know.

Summary:
 1. Do you create rpms with Gentoo and use them someplace else?
 2. What's your take on (re)moving app-arch/rpm-5?

Also any other ideas on use of rpm on Gentoo would be appreciated. For
example rpm.eclass is still bit unknown for me for now...I still have to
see what's it about :-)

Disclaimer: By day I work @ Red Hat, which makes decision about removing
rpm-5 all the more complicated for me.

-- 
Stanislav Ochotnicky
PGP: 0x71A1677C


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