On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 03:36:26PM -0400, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> >Is there any benefit for them to join rpm5.org?  There must be a good
> >reason.  There's nothing more than that.  (They might know that  
> >there's
> >a good reason, or they might know that there is not.  This is rather
> >non-political argument.)
> 
> Asking me what their reason(s) are is pointless. All I know is I asked,
> and saw several SuSE developers at both FOSDEM in February and OLS
> last month.
> 
> There's lots that is dead-on with the OpenSUSE build system. OTOH,
> some of the compatibility issues integrating "weak dependencies" and
> the other RFE's at
>     http://wiki.rpm.org/Problems_of_Building
> will be tricky, not all of the mentioned problems are properly  
> formulated yet imho.

To me, weak dependencies are bullshit (that's straight, yeah).
Either there is a dependency, or there is not.  BTW, SuSE paper
on their smart SAT solver says the SAT solver can't handle weak
dependencies anyway.

(This does not mean I object weak dependencies.  Let them be.
I just see them as a sort of some special comments.)

(Also, to me, rpm is not a "deus ex machina", by which I mean that
rpm is not supposed to resolve complicated dependency stuff.  There
must be external solvers associated with external rpm repositories,
such as apt-get or yum.  In other words, I see librpm as a simple
yes-or-no thing.)

> >Well, something what, basically I like rpm5.org because things are
> >straight and there's no any kind of political endorsement or whatever.
> >I can hack as long as I like and as long as I don't break too much.
> >This also means that I can contribute back and forth (even if I don't
> >like some of rpm5 new pieces.)  Perhaps this is a good reason for
> >developers to join.
> 
> ;-) Basically why I joined @rpm5.org too.

Let's gather more developers then.  I would rather say hackers,
unencumbered with political stuff or something.  People who want
to hack should join.  Perhaps the worst thing that can happen is
that their code is ifdeffed.

Honestly, there's another approach: don't touch that "rpm" thing
unless it breaks; that's probably okay, too.

> Seriously, rpm "make check" is starting to congeal sufficiently
> that I'm way less worried about undetected breakage like
> RPM_CHAR_TYPE. Yes better "legacy" checks need to be added.