On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 11:58 +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
new repodata format)IMO, this is more a matter of politics and willingness, but a technical requirement.
Technically, I don't see any need for apt to adopt yum's repodata format. Politically, this requirement is introduced by RH not wanting to add apt-repositories and fedora.us apparently being unable to set up complete repositories. If apt-repositories are cleverly set up, the additional overhead they introduce in addition to the original files becomes more or less negligible.
Sure, it can be viewed as politics/willingness or lack of thereof. I personally see the lack of repodata support in apt as an example of the standstill in apt's development which in turn hints that maybe it's time to move forward to something else :)
BTW: Even SuSE is available with apt. I wonder why they don't have the multilib issue - I guess they don't ship multilibs :)
Apt has zero problems with mixing 32bit and 64bit packages IF the packages have different names. Suse packages their 32bit stuff for x86_64 with something like libfoo32bit names which circumvents the whole problem. Apt just can't sanely support packages having same name but different arch being simultaneously installed (+ a bunch of other misc related details)
- Panu -