From Progeny Componentized Linux page:
Our future development efforts will center around bridging the gap between Debian APT and the APT variants that have emerged in the RPM world, as well as adding support for emerging efforts to standardize software repository formats.
There is only one APT “variant” which works with RPM. It’s named APT-RPM, and was developed at Conectiva. Of course Progeny knows that, since they certainly remember where their code came from.
It’s really sad to see a company like that, with Ian Murdock behind it, not giving credit to a project which was forked from a Debian software, and that gave back to the original project so much. Perhaps the only way to fight against that kind of behavior is working even harder to produce good software.
Hey, Progeny, want some new ideas to reinvent. ;-)
Wasn’t there something called apt4rpm as well?
Yes, there is.
This project is a set of scripts OVER apt-rpm, nothing more than that.
Apt-rpm was originally developed inhouse at Conectiva by Alfredo Kojima, from WindowMaker fame, in a day that both debian apt and rpm developers said that was impossible to do that.
kojima did in something like a week first working tests.
After he leaves for other company, Gustavo Niemeyer step up on code and made all the current and important modifications, including turn back the improvements for apt debian team.
I suppose if you want to fight, that’s your choice.
On the other hand, you could also ask us what we meant, instead of assuming we meant the worst thing you can imagine.
Since you asked… :-)
You guys added RPM support to apt, which was good. You also went ahead and added a lot of other stuff to apt, some of which is good and some, well, not. This meant, for better or for worse, that apt-rpm became less of an enhancement to apt and more of a fork of apt over time.
All I meant with that (and I’m the guy behind the sentiment in your quote) is that we need to reconcile the fork, and re-merge, possibly redoing or even rejecting some of the apt-rpm enhancements. Do you consider that to be a bad thing?
As for smart, you’d be surprised at the level of enthusiasm within Progeny for it.
Hello Jeff,
I wasn’t talking about what you meant in the first place. I was talking about what you wrote, and the fact that you just didn’t care to give credit about something that we even exchanged ideas about, and just said “those many APT-RPM variants”, when you know that there’s only one such project.
You mention that we’ve just forked the project, but you’re probably aware that we’ve been trying to merge as much as possible, being in contact with Jason and Matt Zimmerman for a long time. Indeed, the 0.5 series includes many changes which were supposed to help in that process (the 0.3 series were much more hackish regarding the integration part, since APT didn’t expect some of the RPM needs). Having a single project was always our goal, and I do hope that you manage to do that. Just, please, don’t arrive a few years late and say that you did the whole work getting patches from “various related projects”.
About Smart, I’m really glad you’re enthusiastic about it. I’ve never seen any comments from you, anywhere. Would be nice to see what you’re doing, your comments, and suggestions on it.
>> bridging the gap between Debian APT and the APT variants that have emerged in the RPM world
> There is only *one* APT “variant” which works with RPM.
No, he said “variants”, not “forks”. If you can stop complaining for not being explicitly cited, you can see that there *are* APT variants. Remember yum?
Surely apt-rpm is great, but it is definitely not *the one and only*…
Please, don’t try to play with words. That’s exactly what he meant, as you can see from the comment above.
Why do you lose your time with them? I have tried both Apt and Smartpm, I really don’t understand why you bother with them. Smartpm is so much better: better depency resolution, paralle downloading, multiple format resolution. The only thing it lacks is FAME. , It is a shame magazines and websites keep recommending the inferior apt instead of smartppm.