An engineer at Mandriva is writing a series of technical articles pinpointing some problems in the current development distribution and proposing solutions. An interesting reading for people interested in Linux distribution development. Includes research on package management and compares buildsystems.
Mandriva technical articles
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Build System Analysis was an interesting one. What kind of setup do smaller RPM builders use?
Dependency Optimization was the other. Especially interesting to those complainging about “all the dependencies” when they go to install packages, and have to search everywere.
These articles are all interesting. For example, read BuildSystemAnalysis to learn why something as monstrous as http://www.debian.org/devel/buildd/ may be needed. While you’re at it, read Debian’s solution too.
Won’t someone PLEASE think of the interfaces!
Bhaa! Interfaces are for lamers !
this is the perfect moment for madriva to move to an apt-repository based system.
for home and non-technical users, a frsshly installed ubuntu has repositories configured for updating and installing – that would be perfect for mandriva.
Wll,urpmi works fine, but they may be using the smart package manager when it becomes stable.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=334&slide=2…
As far as I know, both urpmi and apt-get work on Mandriva repositories, or at least it used to be this way with Mandrake 10.1
The article about the dependency (not direct, but through a dependency chain) of unzip on libusb was very interesting. Sometimes it seems like dependencies are getting out of hand, with circular dependencies and more and more packages being pulled in. Each time I update my DE, more packages are necessary, though they provide features I will not use.
I guess that’s the price I pay for the convenient time saving of a primarily binary distro
rpmdrake in MDV 2005 LE already has an ‘add’ button for setting up the common urpmi media (main and contrib). As I’ve said to you many times in these threads, apt would provide _no significant advantage_ over urpmi for Mandriva. Read these articles, they are about something else entirely.