Year: 2013

The future of package management in Fedora

It’s nice to see there is hope for a better package management in Fedora…

• YUM upstream will soon be considered deprecated, and we will move into a DNF/hawkey/librepo-based future. This includes PackageKit. I’m going to be building a hawkey based backend with help from the maintainer, and he is is aware of what PK does and any unusual tasks that are performance critical.
• We should keep old versions of metadata on the server to stop metadata refresh explosions happening where yesterdays primary gets updated because a transaction only has todays filelists installed. This will significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth used by the metadata updates.
• We should keep old versions of packages on the mirrors, to avoid the case where we depsolve fine, get 404 on the package download and then have to re-download MD, depsolve, etc. YUM apparently has issues with multiple versions of a package being present in the metadata, so we should probably only reference the latest packages in the MD (which also keeps the MD to sane size).
• We should ship the per-arch solv files in the repo MD. This avoids SAT solutions like libsolv from spending 20 seconds+ per repo rebuilding .solv files from sqlite or xml metadata, and allows us to kill the dnf cron job
• We should teach rpm to update it’s own SAT database, which we can do with an RPM plugin.
• We want a software center, and fedora-tagger can provide the ratings/comments information. We might need an OCS server for screenshots, or can tie in screenshots with automated QA somehow.
• We are going to teach koji about appstream data, so a simple extract script (to be written by me) can produce a .tar file of icons and a .xml file of translated descriptions at the end of each koji build
• We are going to teach the compose tools to xmlmerge all the appstream .xml files and ship as appstream.xml
• We are going to teach the compose tools to join all the tar files and ship as appstream-data.tar.gz
• We are going to investigate the use of meta-desktop files to install a super-set of applications, e.g. KDE, or “Python developer” which allows for screenshots, ratings and all that stuff.