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Summary

Rethinking whether URPMI is the best package manager for us, and considering other options.

Owner

  • Name: Mustafa Muhammad
  • Email: <mustafaa.alhamdaani@gmail.com>

Resources

List here people who will be implied in this feature (packagers, QA, doc, ...)


Current status

  • Targeted release: Mageia 4
  • Last updated: 2013/07/2
  • Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description

We use URPM tools, openSUSE uses zypper, Fedora uses yum, there is also zif, and others. Our URPM tools currently lacks some features (most importantly for me, differential updates (downloading only the difference of a package, not the whole package)), broken PackageKit backend, the orphan management is not optimum, among other problems. (I think there is support for delta-rpms, but it is not used by Mageia, please correct me if I am wrong)

I know this is radical, and I don't want to underestimate any person's work. But I think we should consider our options in package management to reduce duplicated efforts, e.g. yum uses delta-rpms and zypper uses differential updates, both have good PackageKit integration. so what is wrong with them? why not use them?

I do not suggest deprecating URPM tools, I am sure there are lots of features I don't know about, but if other package managers are better overall, let's make a switch.

Why it would be good for Mageia to include it

To include some good and important features (e.g. reduce everybody's bandwidth for updates), PackageKit, and maybe even AppStream. Also will make more unity and resource sharing in the Linux world (on the other hand several different projects is good for emulation).

Test case

Software / Packages Dependencies

  • URPM tools
  • YUM or Zypper or Zif

What could disrupt development of this new feature

Love for our well known software.

Planning

  1. Discuss the options, if URPM tools are the best, port the missing features to it. If not, proceed:
  2. Choose the best alternative.
  3. Port it to Mageia and prepare temporary alternative repositories.
  4. If it worked reliably, switch to it by default.

Contingency

Proceed shipping the same package manager as Mageia 3.

Release Notes

Documentation

http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/zif/

http://yum.baseurl.org/

http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Libzypp