Gentoo Archives: gentoo-portage-dev

From: andrea ferraris <andrea_ferraris@××××××.it>
To: gentoo-portage-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-portage-dev] Conary
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 22:03:26
Message-Id: 4176E087.7090909@libero.it
1 Hi all!
2
3 This one will be my first msg to the list and maybe also
4 the last one.
5 I'm not a portage developer, neither a free software
6 developer, maybe a sysadm, fallen in love of Linux more
7 than 10 years ago; it was 1.0 kernel and Slackware.
8
9 Now, after many years of RedHat, some Mandrake's and
10 SUSE's usage and Debian too (few, very few because their
11 installer was really worst than the Gentoo one and I'm not
12 joking), it's about a year that I'm using Gentoo with big
13 satisfaction.
14 It's really a great - for me the greatest - distribution
15 and its philosophy (a meta-distribution where the focus is
16 on the user's freedom) is the best one for me, but I think
17 also in the true Linux spirit (the free software of the
18 excellence).
19 One of the reasons to choose Gentoo has been portage, its
20 power and its flexibility. I think it's really better (in a
21 objective manner) than rpm or dpkg and it can solve problems
22 they can't address.
23 Many years ago I went away from Slackware to RedHat because
24 rpm was really better than tgz to manage packages,
25 dependencies, installations, uninstallations and upgrades,
26 like in these days I think portage is better than rpm and
27 dpkg.
28
29 Now I found on the lwn.net (Linux Weekly News) of thursday,
30 Oct 14, an article on Conary. From its home page
31 http://www.specifix.com/technology/index.htm it is:
32
33 "a distributed software management system for Linux
34 distributions. It replaces traditional package mangement
35 solutions (such as RPM and dpkg) with one designed to
36 enable loose collaboration across the Internet.
37 Conary enables sets of distributed and loosely connected
38 repositories to define the components which are installed
39 on a Linux system. Rather than having a full distribution
40 come from a single vendor, Conary allows administrators
41 and developers to branch a distribution, keeping the
42 pieces which fit their environment while grabbing components
43 from other repositories across the Internet.
44 [...]
45 complete information on Conary is available from the
46 Conary Wiki <http://wiki.specifixinc.com>.
47 It includes links to white papers, technical papers,
48 documentation, and source code. It also provides information
49 on Specifix's Linux distribution which was built using
50 Conary."
51
52 I'd ask you, who can develop and developped that superb thing
53 that's portage to see if there are - and I think that yes,
54 there are - usefull concepts, idea and code to grab from there
55 to make yet better portage.
56
57 In my Gentoo system administration experience there are at
58 least 2-3 things that with a Conary sw management system
59 could address better than portage. It is local configuration
60 files updates, binary only updates and updates of the only
61 changed things, instead of full ones.
62 The first one is simple: in a litle gentoo system that I'm
63 managing for a year now with authomatic nightly updates,
64 I had to update almost manually about a hundred of
65 configuration files. The system (gentoo) is well designed,
66 so, if I didn't update, all works because the original
67 configuration files stay in place, but for the better and
68 also only for the good, the thing to do is to use etc-update
69 to update such configuration files. The problem is that such
70 process is really time consuming and error prone, so it's
71 not very good.
72 Instead it seems that, from the architecture level, Conary
73 has been made to manage local configuration changes an
74 updates to avoid such pains.
75 The second thing is the binary choice. In Gentoo is more
76 difficult than it should be (at least from my point ov view),
77 it is that the system gives the choice of binary updates only,
78 but it's really difficult to find only binary packages and
79 also if one can find them it's impossible to find only
80 modified files in a package and to update only those and also
81 to download only diffs and only binaries diffs. I think that
82 also these things could be achieved studying the Conary
83 way.
84
85 Sorry for the length of the message and for the absence
86 of code, practical idea or implementations.
87 I'm sorry, but I can't.
88
89 Best regards, good gentooing to all and yet better
90 portageing to you,
91
92 Andrea
93
94 --
95 gentoo-portage-dev@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Conary Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@g.o>