[poky] RPM vs IPK

[Richard Purdie]

On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 15:39 -0600, Gary Thomas wrote:
> On 10/29/2010 03:33 PM, Gary Thomas wrote:
> > I notice that in the latest master, rpm-native is always built,
> > even if I'm using ipk style packaging.
> >
> > * Why?
> > * Why should I choose one over the other? I'm happy using rpm
> > (been using it for 15 years!) but I wonder why the switch?
> > Is rpm to become the de-facto packaging for Poky builds?
> 
> Also, if it's to be rpm, will there be a yum (or equivalent)?
> Otherwise, what tool will be used to manage dependency tracking, etc?

This was covered in some emails that were sent a couple of months ago. 

Poky continues to support multiple packaging backends including ipk. We
do however plan to use the best tools for the job and there is a tool
called something like rpmdeps which does some dependency calculations
really well. This tool is therefore used during do_package and the
results are shared between all the packaging backends. As an example of
the kind of dependency it can provide, it will look for scripts using
python/perl/bash and then add the appropriate dependencies but there are
other things as well.

So the dependency on rpm-native is expected, it doesn't mean we're going
rpm only, just that we use the best tools for the job.

Also, since we do support packaging management with rpm, we did add
zypper as our yum equivalent for the rpm use case.

Cheers,

Richard