RPM is Really Poorly Maintained

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

I created openembedded-essential package for Debian derived distributions which depend on all packages required by OpenEmbedded. It took me about 5 minutes to get first version working and 15 to get it polished. Resulting package depends on needed stuff and contain only own changelog.

Then I tried to create RPM version for all those RedHat/Fedora/Mandriva derived distros… RPM HowTo is from 1999 year and RPM 4.4.1 refuse to work with spec from this HowTo. So I started to dig for other manuals — found one from 2002, then some others. But still no idea how to build RPM package which DOES NOT have sources and/or patches — just pure dependencies and own changelog.

How does RPM based maintainers do their job? Thats probably a good question…



Aurox - the other way to Linux on desktop

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

Today I again had to work on getting customer server working for website which we did at work. Since my last visit machine was replaced from crappy Celeron 333MHz with 128M ram and 2G SCSI harddrive — all under 5 years old RedHat with 2.4.2 kernel — to dual p3/700 with 1G ram and much larger harddrive. It also got updated distribution but something a bit newer — Aurox 10.1 with 2.6.9 kernel.

Remote logged as root looks weird.. all shells with # — but if admin is lazy or do not know how to create user accounts…

The worst thing was that I had to be an admin there to get all LAMP components working in required versions. Now machine is building newer PHP from source because finding something on Aurox website is like looking into /dev/null ;( No informations for older releases, no public bugtracker, two misc forums (newer one treat my Firefox as WAP browser) — nightmare…

But it is nice to find that RPM based distros got some tools to fetch packages from network other then wget ;)