[Yum-devel] Considering yum/rpm for SDK distribution - seeking advice

[Seth Vidal]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, James Aley wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Background: I work for the Symbian Foundation. We're a non-profit that
> over-see the Symbian operating system. This is an open source (EPL) OS
> for mobile phones, primarily used by Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung,
> or anyone else that wants to. My team is "technology management", we
> work on the platform road map, sourcing contributions, etc.
>

interesting.


> To me, the obvious solution seems to be package management, as I'm
> very much against reinventing the wheel and can see projects like yum
> have already solved some common problems brilliantly. I have a few
> concerns though, so I'd really appreciate if anyone can answer any of
> the following (with respect to yum?) or generally offer advice if you
> think we're barking up the wrong tree!
>
> * Given that this is an SDK we're distributing, I think the package
> manager's database should work with a "sub-environment" on the
> developer's machine, i.e. not touch anything that belongs to the host
> OS and work from a configurable root environment variable. Is that
> already supported in yum? Or, does it sound like a bad idea generally
> speaking?

rpm (what yum uses underneath) doesn't have a good way of referring to 
multiple databases for installed dep resolution and yum doesn't implement 
anything like that either. So if this is a requirement it's pretty much a 
nonstarter.

Now - if you're just talking about being able to run things from chroots - 
that's a different ballgame.



> * We have a commitment to support all major platforms. Would we be
> able to port yum to Windows/Mac trivially, or should we forget it? I
> sense headaches in creating RPMs that even make sense on a Windows
> environment, but the limited scope of installing packages to the SDK
> environment only might help overcome that?

making rpms which make sense on windows will be complicated. Now, rpms for 
mac osx already exist and are used.



> Also, any recommendations for documentation I should look at would be great.

I guess I'm bit unclear what the use case is for the sdk deployment? It 
seems more likely you would want to prepare rpms for the linux systems, 
windows installers for the windows env and dmgs for the macs. In much the 
same way firefox, for example, does now.

Rather than trying to get all your users to use your tools it seems like 
it would be vastly less effort for you to use the tools your users' 
systems' provide.

does that make sense?

-sv