Panu Matilainen wrote:
For Extras it's irrelevant but I think JBJ was talking about adding apt- rpm to Core.
I was talking about adding to FC4, and there still appears to be interest, although perhaps in passing,
considering the irony that I am suggesting adding apt-rpm to FC4 and you are suggesting unnecessary ;-)
Implementing multilib in a depsolver is not that hard, one needs to check Provides: and Requires:
color, and match iff the same color for each (or no color, that is the traditional rpm behavior). There were
perhaps 10 places that required about 5 lines of code in rpmlib to make that happen. The harder problem
was attaching dependencies to files that carry a elf32/elf64 color, but that is not an apt-rpm issue.
There are a number of cheats to use repomd data only during initial package discovery, just like yum itself
is doing. Alas, a Header is still the only ticket that rpmtsAddInstallElement() will punch for a ride through
rpmlib, so yum is pulling the header using a HTTP GET with byte-range from the package, and the xml
metadata is used to determine which headers (and packages) need to be pulled. Similar things could
be done for apt-rpm.
But I'm not at all sure how and when lack of multilib and repo-md support became critical deficiencies
for depsolvers. There are many who love apt still, Fink on Mac OSX comes to mind.
73 de Jeff
