binary rpm repos?

[Anders F Björklund]

Brian Forte wrote:

> At risk of igniting an argument I believe it's worth noting there  
> are two active RPM projects.

There are probably better places to pick RPM fights, than on MacPorts...

> The [RPM 4.x project][1] is maintained by Panu Matilainen, who  
> works for Red Hat. The [RPM 5.x project][2] is maintained by Jeff  
> Johnson, who used to work for Red Hat.
>
> Both projects are GPL-licensed and both are in active development.  
> RPM 4.6 came out 2009/02/06 and 4.7 beta 1 was released 2009/02/26.  
> RPM 5.1.7 came out 2009/03/07, the same day as RPM 5.2a3.

Actually rpm5.org uses the LGPL license (i.e. the "Lesser"), not the  
GPL.

RPM 4.4.9 was released 2007/05/21, RPM 4.4.2.3 was released 2008/04/01.

> Although I know very little about the RPM 5 project, the straight- 
> forward mechanics of forked projects suggest it is unwise to assume  
> an rpm package built to work with the RPM 4.x project code will  
> work seamlessly with an RPM 5-based installation (or vice versa).
>
> This would especially be the case for packages built using versions  
> of either RPM project released since Red Hat relaunched the 4.x  
> project in May 2007. Since that relaunch, both projects have  
> proceeded apace with their code-bases inevitably diverging as a  
> consequence.


Both projects have forked away from the original 4.4.2 release in 2005.

> Nonetheless the two projects are separate and, so far as I'm aware,  
> aren't checking their changes against each other to ensure  
> everything works perfectly between the two. Most specifically,  
> there are differences between the projects concerning what is and  
> isn't supported in an rpm package's .spec file.
>
> All of which is a long-winded way of suggesting it's possible an  
> rpm package prepared for use against one RPM project might behave  
> in an unexpected way if that package is then installed, managed or  
> otherwise interacted with by the other RPM.

Spec portability shouldn't matter for RPMS built from MacPorts  
Portfiles.

> The rpm4darwin project noted by Alexy Khrabrov above is based on  
> RPM 5.

That is not true, rpm4darwin was based on RPM 4.0 - 4.3 from 2001 -  
2004.

> If you're grabbing binary rpm packages from 'rpm-based distros'  
> such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, openSUSE or  
> Mandriva, however, these RPMs were built using RPM 4.

The binary RPM packages for Linux work rather poorly on Darwin, anyway ?

> Finally, and FWIW, there are portfiles available for RPM [4.x and  
> 5.x][6], although the 5.x portfiles are closer to being in sync  
> with upstream.

There are no ports for rpm.org in MacPorts at the moment, only rpm5.org

--anders