On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 5:05 AM Dridi Boukelmoune <dridi.boukelmoune@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Greetings packagers, > > I know how important RPM is to the Fedora Project, but it breaks > everything downstream and we'd be better off using DPKG as we should > have from day one. > > I'm calling this initiative fedpkg: Fedora Embraces DPKG. > > A bit of background here: I build both RPMs and DEBs for $DAYJOB and > until recently my workflow was quite painful because I needed extra steps > between git checkout and git push that involves a VM, because what we > ship as apt is in reality apt-rpm. > > It finally got enough on my nerves to locally build the things I needed and > after a month I have already amortized my efforts with the time I save not > having to deal with needless extra hoops. > > In order to successfully build debs on Fedora I needed 4 packages that > I'm now submitting for review: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=gnu-config > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=strip-nondeterminism > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=sbuild > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=apt > > I need more than reviews here. > > Three of those packages are heavy on Perl code, and I'm not a Perl > Monk. I tried to CC perl-sig as per the guidelines [1] (also tried with > the mailing list address) but bugzilla replied kindly: > > CC: perl-sig did not match anything > > Apt is a mix of C, Perl and C++ code, so I would be reassured if I > could have a C++ co-maintainer too. I'm only a C developer so if > something goes wrong outside of the C realm that would be helpful. > > Two of those packages should be runtime dependencies of debhelper. > > The current apt package should be renamed to apt-rpm, I will look up > the procedure for that to happen. I understand that when someone sees > they should run "apt-get install foo" somewhere on the web it's > helpful for non-savvy users that this JustWorks(tm) [2], but apt-rpm is > dead upstream and it shouldn't be advertised as apt. > > I hope I CC'd everyone that should get this heads up, and hope to find > help for the reviews and co-maintainership. The packaging does nothing > fancy, there are quirks here and there but overall it was rather easy > to put together. And of course I would be happy to help with reviews > too in exchange. > > And thanks again to the mock developers, its design is so much better > than either sbuild or pdebuild that I barely have pain points left when it > comes to RPM packaging. > For what it's worth, this was a terrible lede for this email. And having worked extensively with both package managers, I can sincerely tell you both are ugly as hell, but rpm is less ugly than dpkg. Thankfully, I don't need to go into the reasons why, because this is not actually about switching to dpkg and its completely terrible system. If all you wanted was the rest of the tooling in so you can build Debian packages in Fedora, that's really not a problem. I made an apt-dpkg package a while ago and worked with APT upstream to make it build and have the tests work (mostly) on Fedora a couple of years ago. I imported it into COPR so you can see it: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ngompa/apt-dpkg/build/860086/ Instead of renaming the apt package to apt-rpm, we can introduce the apt-dpkg package that conflicts with apt for your purposes. I wish we could have the rpm backend integrated into the Debian upstream apt, but someone needs to drive that effort, and no one really cares anymore. It hasn't happened in the past due to frustrations with working with Debian upstream, and now it's diverged so much that they are separate upstreams. My understanding is that the current upstream developers are interested in an rpm backend, but they don't want to do any effort to make it happen. Also, you can build debs using RPM spec files[1], if you're aware enough to handle the differences. :) [1]: https://github.com/ascherer/debbuild -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
