In a conversation on the beowulf list, the following idea occurred to me. I don't remember if it has been discussed on the list already or not, but for version 3.x, future super-yum, I think that it would be really spiffy if in addition to binary rpm repositories yum supported source rpm repositories. On a modern system, an rpm --rebuild for many packages takes anywhere from a few seconds to as much as a few minutes and the system is quite usable while the build is going on. I suggest this because it occurs to me that a very "interesting" solution to the dilemna of future systems support with distribution vendors trying to crank up significant marginal profits on a per-host basis might be to convert the linux/package paradigm altogether so that it is potentiall src rpm based. Sure, it is now, but it isn't EASY now -- you really have to be pretty smart, pretty good, to deal with rpm builds because of (surprise) dependency issues and occasional compatibility issues. If yum as a client app could do transparent build from source rpm's, the marginal effort of an "upgrade" could be significantly reduced, as could the dependency on any distribution vendor at all. This might not work for all kinds of packages -- some of them deal with hardware and complicated collectives of libraries and applications -- but it might work just fine for >>most<< of the packages in a given distribution. Furthermore, if the tool is built to support the paradigm, people will start building repositories and even assembling distributions that work with the paradigm. A future yum repository might well >>fundamentally<< be a source rpm directory, with yum-arch and yum2rpm as tools to organize them and optionally transmogrify them into a distribution set. Just thinking of ways to break us out of distribution/revision slavery. rgb Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@xxxxxxxxxxxx
