On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 11:43 AM Randy Barlow
<bowlofeggs(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
On Fri, 2019-10-18 at 11:21 -0400, Robbie Harwood wrote:
> Obviously we
> can't use their code wholesale without migrating to APT, but as you
> say,
> the goal is to derive inspiration.
But yeah as you say here, my original point was more that we could
learn from what others did and integrate similar concepts into RPM/dnf,
especially since what they did was simpler, and as a result of that
simplicity didn't struggle to gain adoption. Those concepts were also
easier to write the code to make them happen. For example, adding a
slot field to the RPM would be pretty easy and I think is obvious that
we wouldn't need to create build services like Ursa Major to make that
work. We would need a change to Koji and dnf to consider the slot as
part of a package's uniqueness, but I think that's a small change in
comparison. It's easier to create and easier to use, which I see as a
win-win.
Thanks for mentioning the Debian solution. I wasn't familiar with that
one. This means we have even more solutions to study for inspiration.
Too fast, too slow is a solved problem and there are existing solutions
to learn from or even adapt. We don't need to make our own.
RPM + DNF actually already supports Debian's solution.
Philosophically, RH/Fedora systems don't typically use alternatives as
aggressively as Mageia, SUSE, or Debian systems. We do actually
generate virtual names and use them, and we can use them to satisfy
things like this. We already do this with Rust by having parallel
installable stuff with common names that work with ranged
dependencies.
There are other things we could do along these lines, too...
--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!