On Wed, 2018-11-21 at 11:31 -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
After having introduced a new format (OSTree) into the ecosystem
here,
as well as working a lot on the Docker/OCI ecosystem, one thing I want
to emphasize is:
A lot of Red Hat's customers don't connect their systems to the Internet,
they want easy offline mirroring. OSTree supports that, and it's
also possible to do with OCI images of course.
But, a lot organizations use e.g.
https://jfrog.com/artifactory/
which today doesn't support OSTree (it does support RPM and Docker/OCI).
So any format break for RPM wouldn't be usable until Artifactory gains
support for it. And even after that happened you'd have in some
places a large lag time for it to be deployed.
In general, any data format break is going to impose a lot higher
costs than you might imagine.
Thanks for bringing up these points. You are undoubtedly correct that
there's an unknown cost associated with these changes, but hopefully
the cost will become a little clearer once we have a POC.
(Also on this topic, I should note that the OSTree data format
cleanly
fixes a lot of the issues being discussed here; it has deltas, and also
doesn't make the mistake of checksumming compressed data,
when performing updates only changed files are rewritten, not to mention
a whole transactional update system, etc.)
Yep. I've experimented with OSTree and love the concepts behind it. I
don't think we're quite ready to ditch the classic rpm systems yet,
though.
Jonathan