Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
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Back in 2006, LWN looked at the rather complicated story around the maintainership of the RPM package manager. Given the importance of this tool for any RPM-based distribution, the lack of a clear story on how it was being maintained was somewhat discouraging. Later that year, the Fedora project announced the creation of a new, community-oriented project around RPM. Since then, things have been on the quiet side, but recent events show that the RPM story has not yet run its course.
The above-mentioned RPM project lives on at rpm.org; the 4.9.0 release was announced at the beginning of March. The code is actively maintained and sees the addition of some small features, but the project does not show any real signs of having big plans for the future. Only a handful of committers show up in the repository; almost all of them work for Red Hat. By all appearances, RPM is at least halfway into maintenance mode.
But rpm.org is not the only RPM out there; a fork exists at rpm5.org. This version is maintained primarily by Jeff Johnson, a former Red Hat employee who has set out to create a better RPM outside of the company. This version has focused on wider portability, has added features like new compression formats, and a number of other things; the full feature list is not exactly easy to find, and searching for the significant entries in the changelog is not a project for anybody who is short on time. One of the key features, though, seems to be transactional package management (also called "RPM ACID"); the idea here is to ensure that any RPM operation either succeeds or fails fully, regardless of what may happen in the middle. According to Jeff, killing an rpm4 operation in the middle can leave a corrupted system behind; rpm5 is meant to eliminate that possibility.
The rpm5 fork arguably has more development activity and some interesting new features. That said, it has remained a relatively obscure project; it has been picked up by distributions like Alt Linux, ArkLinux, and Unity Linux, but has not been seriously considered by the larger distributors. That has changed, though, in recent months; the Mandriva 2011 plans include a switch to rpm5. That has brought a lot more attention to this fork, with some interesting outcomes.
It has not always been clear to everybody in the Mandriva camp that this switch is a good idea; back in November, Eugeni Dodonov started an extensive discussion by asking about the reasoning behind this change:
Many others spoke up on both sides of the issue; the discussion grew rather heated and unpleasant at times. The decision to go with rpm5 seemed to be motivated by a number of considerations. Some of the new features were attractive to Mandriva. The development community for rpm5 was seen as being more active and open than for rpm4, which was seen as dominated by Red Hat and relatively closed. Mandriva was carrying a long list of patches against rpm4 which, evidently, could be upstreamed into rpm5 but not into rpm4. The notion of compatibility with the other large RPM-based distributions was seen as illusory at best; each distribution was seen as heavily patching rpm4 for its own needs and it has always been difficult to do non-native installations of RPM packages. And, importantly, Mandriva's RPM maintainer, Per Øyvind Karlsen, wanted to go that way:
So that is how it went. Per Øyvind's assertion that the change "really
shouldn't affect people in a negative way
" turned out not to be quite the
case, though; Mandriva's "cooker" mailing list has been dominated by
discussions of rpm5-related issues ever since. Other small transitions - to
systemd, for example - have not generated a fraction of the traffic.
A transition of this type was never going to be easy; it has been further
complicated by the facts that integration with Mandriva's
higher-level tools has been a big job and rpm5 has had some growing
pains in the process of scaling up to a distribution of the size and
complexity of Mandriva.
It must be said that, through this process, Jeff has clearly put in a massive amount of time supporting Mandriva. One could have easily gotten the impression that he had been hired by the company as part of this project. As problems were reported, Jeff worked to solve them. It is a rare development project that will put that much effort into supporting its users - even high-profile users; Jeff has performed a real service for Mandriva.
That support faltered a bit at the end of April, when Jeff abruptly announced that the rpm5 mailing list archive (and much of the rest of the site) had been taken down. His responses to queries about why this happened are best described as abusive; by his own admission, he wanted to stop the discussion as quickly as possible. The site has since returned; there is also a new rpm6.org which, for now, redirects to rpm5.org.
What is going on is far from clear, but there are hints in this message from Jeff where he
accuses an ex-Mandriva developer of being "responsible for destroying the
rpm5 brand.
" He is clearly
tired of dealing with problem reports and complaints about rpm5, many of
which, he says, are not really related rpm5 problems. But much of the
trouble seems to come from the fact that Mageia - a fork of Mandriva - has
not followed Mandriva into the rpm5 transition. Mageia's position, as described by Anne Nicolas, seems reasonable:
the Mageia developers are busy enough just trying to get a releasable
distribution together. Given all that needs to be done, throwing in a
low-level package management system change just didn't seem like the best
idea.
It would appear that there is some bad blood remaining between the Mandriva and Mageia camps. There are hints of non-public discussions that have been rather less friendly than what can be seen on the public lists; Jeff and rpm5 may well have been dragged into some of that. At least, that's what one might conclude from comments like:
I can tell you that a "fork" is a huge waste of time & energy from first hand experience. I can also say that the M&M distros are more similar than different, and strongly suggest that you make peace somehow and move on.
Since then, the tempest seems to have mostly passed, and Jeff is back to talking about making rpm5 work better with Mandriva. But this incident has been a wakeup call for some people in the Mandriva community who now feel they have cause to worry about the foundation on which the 2011 release is being built.
It is going to be interesting to watch what happens from here. Mandriva
appears to be well committed to the rpm5 transition at this point, and,
seemingly, things are beginning to stabilize. If rpm5 performs well in the
final Mandriva 2011 release, it could motivate questions from users of some
of the other distributions on why they are stuck with the "older" version.
Alternatively, users could see the pain Mandriva has been through and, if
the result doesn't appear to be worth it, they may decide that they're
happier with their relatively boring rpm4. Either way, it seems that this
particular drama has not played itself out yet.
(Log in to post comments)
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 16:54 UTC (Tue) by fray (subscriber, #5577) [Link]
The reason for this is fairly simple. It's been very easy to deal with, resolve and fix:
* cross compilation problems
* system level configurations
* embedded patches
Jeff occasionally complains about what he terms as "have it your own way!" configuration as being difficult and someone problematic for him as a maintainer, however this has really provided RPM5 a huge advantage when used on embedded systems. It allows us to customize the behaviors and abilities of the rpm binaries based on our system constraints.
Also above and beyond everything else, we've had the ability to actually suggest and make changes to the way things work as we've found use-cases that simply don't exist on the traditional workstation and server environments.
(Note, I'm also the maintainer of the RPM functionality in OE-Core presently... and I share a similar attitude to Per Øyvind Karlsen, I'm going to do what I think is better and what makes my job easier...)
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 17:24 UTC (Tue) by xxiao (guest, #9631) [Link]
i recommend redhat to get rid of rpm for good and switch to debian format.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 17:47 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 18:39 UTC (Tue) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]
I find the situation totally the opposite: I find building RPMs from source counter-intuitive and the rpmbuild defaults seem all wrong.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 20:01 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Agreed about rpmbuild. I just use mock when building SRPMs for the most part.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 20:34 UTC (Tue) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link]
But indeed the source format ties it together with the tarball instead of shipping the build instructions separately.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 17, 2011 20:54 UTC (Tue) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 19, 2011 19:35 UTC (Thu) by oxan (guest, #75033) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 21:26 UTC (Tue) by kaeso (guest, #49701) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 21:49 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
<shameless-musing>Now if I only could find the OpenSuSE equivalent as well...no luck so far.</shameless-musing>
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 23:27 UTC (Tue) by cowsandmilk (guest, #55475) [Link]
From there, you can drive down into the packages, just picking something random, you have https://build.opensuse.org/package/files?package=perl-JSO... where you can see the spec file, changelog, source, and diffs.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 1:27 UTC (Wed) by misc (guest, #73730) [Link]
http://sophie.zarb.org/sources
That's a big postgresql db with all metadata on binary and sources rpms, and that include patch ( and patch contents most of the time ). But we didn't integrate opensuse source rpm for the moment, so this would not be useful for your usecase.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 14:51 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 16:05 UTC (Wed) by misc (guest, #73730) [Link]
( for matching package name )
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 12:48 UTC (Wed) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link]
> separate from the tarball. [...] AFAICS, to get this
> from dpkg sources, I'd need to download the tarball
> and extract it.
I guess you are confusing something. In RPM distros, the tarball and changes are all stuffed together in one giant .srpm, while in Debian, the upstream code and the packages are separated into two files.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 14:49 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 2:52 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
If you thought rpm's choice for cpio (over tar) was weird, just wait until you see that deb produces a sadistic .tar.gz.a matroshka.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 8:21 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
A deb package is technically gluing of two tarballs: "control" and "data". This gluing is done using an ar archive as ar is a very light-weight archive that adds very little overhead. Here is the content of that archive for some random package:
$ ar tv $PACKAGE.deb
rw-r--r-- 0/0 4 Apr 17 06:55 2011 debian-binary
rw-r--r-- 0/0 1975 Apr 17 06:55 2011 control.tar.gz
rw-r--r-- 0/0 73363 Apr 17 06:55 2011 data.tar.gz
$ ar p $PACKAGE.deb control.tar.gz | tar tzf -
./
./control
./md5sums
$ ar p $PACKAGE.deb control.tar.gz | tar xOzf - ./control
Package: cdbs
Version: 0.4.93
Architecture: all
Maintainer: CDBS Hackers <build-common-hackers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Installed-Size: 376
Depends: debhelper (>= 5.0.30)
Recommends: autotools-dev
Suggests: devscripts
Section: devel
Priority: optional
Description: common build system for Debian packages
This package contains the Common Debian Build System, an abstract build
system based on Makefile inheritance which is completely extensible and
overridable. In other words, CDBS provides a sane set of default rules
upon which packages can build; any or all rules may be overridden as
needed.
The rough equivalents of those in an rpm package is:
data.tar.gz is the cpio archive you mentioned. The metadata and the gluing in a deb package are done in a way that is at least accessible through standard shell tools. It was originally done with some custom dictionary and custom gluing as in RPM, but later on they preferred to use a more standard method.
I'm sure there are some merits to the rpm format. It's just that your criticism is wrong.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 5, 2011 17:18 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link]
Using cpio (one standard format) instead of tar (each version has its own quirks) is sane...
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 6, 2011 1:10 UTC (Fri) by lindahl (guest, #15266) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 6, 2011 4:58 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 20:09 UTC (Tue) by fray (subscriber, #5577) [Link]
Why does Yocto Project (and now OE-Core) require support for RPM? Specifically because there are large segments of commercial customers who specifically require rpm formatted packages in their designs.
(LSB also used to recommend RPM as the package format...)
There is no intention within the Yocto Project or OE to specify one format over another, only to ensure that RPM is on equal footing as to the other formats and not "ignored".
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 12, 2011 12:27 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
An LSB file is a subset of RPM such that alien is guaranteed to work.
Cheers,
Wol
What *is* an rpm?
Posted May 3, 2011 19:07 UTC (Tue) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link]
And, no adding a number or -ng or whatever after "rpm" doesn't cut it.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 17:44 UTC (Tue) by jmayer (subscriber, #595) [Link]
Another point mentioned in this article mentions that the migration from rpm4 to rpm5 isn't "simple" - scalability to a big distro and distro tools are mentioned. How much do these changes impact the "ordinary" package maintainer (required changes, bugs, other)?
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 1:21 UTC (Wed) by misc (guest, #73730) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 2:33 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 5, 2011 12:16 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 20:08 UTC (Tue) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]
Trying to reply to just the most obvious "OMG, WTF" parts of this article:
> Only a handful of committers show up in the repository; almost all of
> them work for Red Hat
You could say the same thing about glibc, or coreutils, or probably a bunch of other tools.
> This [rpm5] version has focused on wider portability, has added features
> like new compression formats, and a number of other things
rpm.org has "xz" compression, since 4.7.0:
http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.7.0#XZpayloadcompression
The two most interesting features I've seen recently are:
http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0#Collections
http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0#Automaticdependencygen...
...both of which are rpm.org only, AFAIK. I know that internal changes went into 4.9.0 to speed up higher level packaging, and another one is planned for 4.9.1 or 4.9.2. Both are rpm.org only.
rpm5 does have rpmgrep though ... haha.
> According to Jeff, killing an rpm4 operation in the middle can leave a
> corrupted system behind; rpm5 is meant to eliminate that possibility
Yeh, right. Think about that. %post can create random files in the FS and then restart a running service ... how do you make that ACID?
Sure, you can make it better ... but, whatever, better doesn't mean much when you say "ACID" and what you get is that you can do one of "yum history redo last" or "yum history undo last" (which is what rpm.org has).
> The rpm5 fork arguably has more development activity and some
> interesting new features
People can argue anything on the internet, both projects are in git though so you can do better than this.
And again with the "some new features", maybe speak to the two/three rpm5 proponents and find out what they are?
> And, importantly, Mandriva's RPM maintainer, Per Øyvind Karlsen,
> wanted to go that way:
Indeed, he's one of the 2 or 3 upstream rpm5 contributors.
> It must be said that, through this process, Jeff has clearly put in a
> massive amount of time supporting Mandriva. [...]
> It is a rare development project that will put that much effort into
> supporting its users - even high-profile users; Jeff has performed a
> real service for Mandriva.
I would expect this kind of commitment from anything so core to the distro. ... but maybe that's just me.
> If rpm5 performs well in the final Mandriva 2011 release, it could
> motivate questions from users of some of the other distributions on why
> they are stuck with the "older" version [...] Either way, it seems that
> this particular drama has not played itself out yet
Again, I think you would have done much better with a "conclusion" here had you spoken to some people ... as I would say that the chance of Fedora moving from rpm to "rpm5" is a bit less than that of it moving to dpkg. Maybe the SuSE guys (or other Fedora people) have a different opinion, but I would bet heavily against that too.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 20:50 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
I found the original article well-written and interesting. It is clear that plenty has gone on behind the scenes. Given the emotional state of things, I wouldn't expect that asking some of the involved people gives you a more unbiased and clearer view of things.
By wording your argument as addressing "the most obvious "OMG, WTF" parts of this article" you have - at least in my case - lost any credibility when it comes to objective and sober reporting and I stopped reading. Which is a pity, because I think you might have been able to contribute interesting facts to the debate.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 4:16 UTC (Wed) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]
I never said it wasn't. Indeed lots of articles on foxnews.com are well written and interesting, but they suffer from the same problem this one does. I don't pay LWN because of the great writing style, I pay them because they (usual) write what is correct and lead, instead of mislead.
> It is clear that plenty has gone on behind the scenes.
Except nothing _has_ gone on "behind the scenes". One rpm packager of one minor distro. decided to use a weird fork of rpm, bummer for them. I hope it doesn't fail too badly for their users.
> Given the emotional state of things, I wouldn't expect that asking some of the involved
> people gives you a more unbiased and clearer view of things
I didn't say LWN should have asked me, or prov/jbj/whoever ... just speak to _someone_. I'm pretty sure if LWN asked any of the Fedora project leaders "is there any question about rpm maintenance" then after they stopped laughing they would have been happy to educate.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 11:02 UTC (Wed) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 12:55 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
FWIW, it has always been my style to base things heavily on public writings. It's how our community works, and I don't want to pretend that I have some special sources of information that nobody else has.This kind of story is always the hardest to write; I'd rather be out trying to understand dcache scalability. Often the only real way to judge success is when all sides seem to be thoroughly upset with me; by that standard, this article has certainly worked.
I don't think I ever said Fedora was likely to do a switch - I know the history there (or at least part of it).
Fox News. Ouch.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 14:25 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 15:10 UTC (Wed) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
Anyways, your article generated a lot of positive and objective discussions with FUD even being dismissed from people such as Floriant Festi of Fedora, which gets a star in my book for his non-biased and straight honest response. :)
Mageia
Posted May 4, 2011 15:15 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
FWIW, the article said nothing about "pushing rpm5 on Mageia." I did say that there seems to be some tension there, which is different.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 18:37 UTC (Wed) by boklm (guest, #34568) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 22:39 UTC (Wed) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
First post he links to is a reply to several questions and requests regarding rpm5, where I did offer to aid them, yet I was *not* the one pushing the issue or even raising anything about rpm to begin with. Read the thread..
The second post is a response to bogus claims and reasoning, which I didn't really pursue arguing much. It only trailed off into a rant about the compatibility their rpm maintainer mentioned and desired, discussing various aspects of it, and reiterating more than once that I did *NOT* try to push rpm5, and I'd be more than happy to try work together independent of their rpm version.
People should rather read the mature and amazingly dumbshit responses I got, with the last one from boklm being the final for me to reply to, stating that his attitude and behaviour being so obvious that adding any further would be redundant..
Oh yes, boklm is Nicolas Vigier, the former mandriva employee which you'd never see being active on cooker mailing lists or community in general, not even being assigned to working on the distribution itself either. Now he's one of the most active people on the list, with continued trolling making us all embarassed and feeling awkward on his behalf and his complete lack of self-awareness...
Neat character, eh?
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 5, 2011 0:09 UTC (Thu) by boklm (guest, #34568) [Link]
Nice ! With proyvind, two links is enough to get a full page of insults ...
At least people can now read the thread to see how you *never* did push rpm5 on Mageia, and what kind of friendly discussions we can have with you.
Insults
Posted May 5, 2011 0:14 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
I think it would be nice if we didn't have more insults here. Technical disagreements are fine, but, please, can we (all) refrain from personal attacks?
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 5, 2011 2:41 UTC (Thu) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
The resposes to the second thread is so amazingly insulting, ignorant and silly that they speak loud and clear for themself.
Nice thing you like to demonstrate and share your own behaviour with the rest of the world without me barely having to lift my finger for it to happen.
Please
Posted May 5, 2011 2:54 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
So please, since you need not lift your fingers, stop lifting them now. Personal attacks don't help anybody, and I'd really rather see fewer of them on LWN.Thanks.
Please
Posted May 5, 2011 5:24 UTC (Thu) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
But I guess we can do without the symbiotic relationship between trolling and troll cannibalism.. ;)
Btw. sorry for my mixup with me claiming you writing me trying to push rpm5 on mageia, I was thinking of the more slanderous osnews article where I even also was blamed as the developer ticking Jeff off..
For what it's worth, your article did generate positive responses and mostly healthy discussions and exchange of information that was actually quite well received at fellows at Mandriva and in our community. :)
Given that you wrote the article watching from the side-line online, you actually showed a remarkable insight which no way in hell can be compared to Fox whatsoever.
Please
Posted May 7, 2011 10:16 UTC (Sat) by boklm (guest, #34568) [Link]
Since the beginning you've been a Mageia hater. We can see it with mails from you like this one at the beginning of the project :
http://www.mageia.org/pipermail/mageia-discuss/20100930/0...
Now with rpm5.org shutdown without notice/rpm6 fork, you've tried to put the blame on "mageia dissident zealot troll" :
http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2011-05/msg00005.php
But thanks to the latest email from Jeff Johnson on cooker, we know more about the reasons for the rpm6 fork :
http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2011-05/msg00266.php
And it has nothing to do with Mageia, trolls, FUD or anything like that.
Please
Posted May 7, 2011 13:29 UTC (Sat) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
Some of the more sensible mageia project members, Michael Scherer, you'll find even sharing the same concerns and voicing some of the same scepticism, asking people not to attack me for asking such questions.
rpm5.org has not been shutdown and the mail forwarded to the cooker list was originally posted to engineering@, where it later was cleared up to be a misunderstanding, quoting from internal mail:
On May 7, 2011, at 7:09 AM, Denis Koryavov wrote:
> Hello Jeff and others!
>
> I think we have some misunderstanding here. Just let me to explain.
> I'm not a Mandriva manager - I work in ROSA Laboratory.
> In ROSA Laboratory we work on many projects (some of them even not based on Mandriva).
>
Yes I've misunderstood your role.
...
> P.S Since I'm not a good English speaker,
> please excuse me for my possible mistakes.
>
And I'm not a good Russian speaker.
You're excused: Never blame a dog for its master.
And anyone who thinks I resemble Britney Sphears likely uses Debian linux
(and reads osnews instead of p0rn).
73 de Jeff
------
So that's where thing actually lies on the map, so given that all your trolls and attempts at pronouncing rpm5.org dead and spreading FUD with articles of yours such as this: https://linuxfr.org/users/boklm/journaux/la-fin-de-rpm5 ,
I think it's time for you to give it a break, people are getting really tired and your motivation and agenda is so extremely transparent and unclever that it's hard to take you seriously even as a person, so for your own and to Mageia's advice, please don't harm your own and your projects credibility and image any further.
Majority of members involved in both Mandriva and Mageia has great interest in collaboration and communication, you've been actively undermining this from the start, if you have any care and respect for the community at full for any of the projects, please stop this crusade of yours immediately.
Please
Posted May 9, 2011 12:44 UTC (Mon) by boklm (guest, #34568) [Link]
rpm5.org has been down for about a week (without any explanation), that's what I was talking about.
> the mail forwarded to the cooker list was originally posted to engineering@, where it later was cleared up to be a misunderstanding, quoting from internal mail:
It doesn't matter why jbj wasn't paid, if there is a valid reason or not, if there was a misunderstanding or not. I'm not talking about that. What I'm telling you is that the reason for shutting down rpm5.org website and announcing an rpm6 fork was a problem (or misunderstanding if you prefer) between Jeff and Mandriva. Which has nothing to do with Mageia, or me, or anyone trolling, contrary to what you've been saying. If there's anyone spreading FUD, it's you.
> Majority of members involved in both Mandriva and Mageia has great interest in collaboration and communication, you've been actively undermining this from the start, if you have any care and respect for the community at full for any of the projects, please stop this crusade of yours immediately.
I have not been undermining anything, I'm not against collaboration, I'm not on a crusade. And I did not announce the death of rpm5, the only thing I did was to ask a simple question about the status of rpm5.org [1] (which it seems interested a lot of people according to the answers in the thread). If Jeff decided to insult people, only give cryptic answers and create rpm6.org, I'm not responsible for this. And I have nothing to do with rpm5.org being shut down. So please stop spreading FUD on me, accusing me of various things, insulting me ...
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 18:52 UTC (Wed) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]
> writings. It's how our community works, and I don't want to pretend
> that I have some special sources of information that nobody else has.
And that might be fine for when everyone is working in "the same room", but not so much when a small number of people are off by themselves. While a bunch of the relevant people might be aware of the rpm5 and Mandrivia MLs, and the "discussions" ... it's not like it'd be a good idea to post to any of those lists.
Also anybody can speak to the FPL/etc, and/or the portion of Fedora/RHEL/SuSE developers who would have some insight.
> Often the only real way to judge success is when all sides seem to be
> thoroughly upset with me; by that standard, this article has certainly
> worked.
For that to be a good test "all sides" have to be wrong. For something like "What is the maintainership status of a core component for a couple of major distributions" that seems ... unlikely.
> I don't think I ever said Fedora was likely to do a switch - I know the
> history there (or at least part of it).
You didn't say it explicitly, but the implication was certainly that rpm5 was a viable replacement fork (like, say, EGCS vs. GCC).
If you reported someone had forked dpkg, then the important point isn't if "Linux Mint" is using it but if Debian/Ubuntu are ... IMO.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 5, 2011 12:25 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 22:03 UTC (Tue) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
Yes, and obviously you're not the person that should've been talked to, while you come of as somewhat informed knowing what you're talking about to others, to those with actual insight and technical knowledge of RPM development can only smile at your naive sense of self-satisfaction.
>Trying to reply to just the most obvious "OMG, WTF" parts of this article:
>> Only a handful of committers show up in the repository; almost all of
>> them work for Red Hat
>You could say the same thing about glibc, or coreutils, or probably a bunch of other tools.
>> This [rpm5] version has focused on wider portability, has added features
>> like new compression formats, and a number of other things
>rpm.org has "xz" compression, since 4.7.0:
>http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.7.0#XZpayloadcompression
Hah, and where do you think that came from? Contributed by whom?
rpm.org actually introduced lzma payload compression in 4.6.0 using the format that changed, making use of it resulting in rpms useless by anyone.
The fixed support of rpm.org was contributed by myself after raising the issue and kicking and screaming on their list for like a half year before I got their attention.
>The two most interesting features I've seen recently are:
>http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0#Collections
if interesting in a morbid sense, then yes
>http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0#Automaticdependencygen...
Nope, we've had it for years, only more and better generators.
>...both of which are rpm.org only, AFAIK. I know that internal changes went >into 4.9.0 to speed up higher level packaging, and another one is planned >for 4.9.1 or 4.9.2. Both are rpm.org only.
As if.. Get a clue, ie. try comparing ruby packaging with rpm5/mandriva with fedora, the one comes out amazingly easy, slick and easy to maintain, while the other one comes out as pathetic by comparision, guess who..
>rpm5 does have rpmgrep though ... haha.
And..?
>> According to Jeff, killing an rpm4 operation in the middle can leave a
>> corrupted system behind; rpm5 is meant to eliminate that possibility
>Yeh, right. Think about that. %post can create random files in the FS and >then restart a running service ... how do you make that ACID?
>Sure, you can make it better ... but, whatever, better doesn't mean much >when you say "ACID" and what you get is that you can do one of "yum history >redo last" or "yum history undo last" (which is what rpm.org has).
Hah, yeah, you'd certainly have more faith and find yum's support for this more credible than what berkeley db has offered as functionality for years..
Get real...
>> The rpm5 fork arguably has more development activity and some
>> interesting new features
>People can argue anything on the internet, both projects are in git though >so you can do better than this.
>And again with the "some new features", maybe speak to the two/three rpm5 >proponents and find out what they are?
Yes, maybe you should rather than commenting and bashing on them here, while touting rpm.org features as new innovations, only lagging behind rpm5.org by several years..
>> And, importantly, Mandriva's RPM maintainer, Per Øyvind Karlsen,
> wanted to go that way:
>Indeed, he's one of the 2 or 3 upstream rpm5 contributors.
There's actually more than 2-3, there's been steadily 4-5 most active developers for the last few years, with about 10 additional other sporadically active developers from various distributions..
>> It must be said that, through this process, Jeff has clearly put in a
>> massive amount of time supporting Mandriva. [...]
>> It is a rare development project that will put that much effort into
>> supporting its users - even high-profile users; Jeff has performed a
>> real service for Mandriva.
>I would expect this kind of commitment from anything so core to the distro. ... but maybe that's just me.
>> If rpm5 performs well in the final Mandriva 2011 release, it could
>> motivate questions from users of some of the other distributions on why
>> they are stuck with the "older" version [...] Either way, it seems that
>> this particular drama has not played itself out yet
>Again, I think you would have done much better with a "conclusion" here had
>you spoken to some people ... as I would say that the chance of Fedora >moving from rpm to "rpm5" is a bit less than that of it moving to dpkg. >Maybe the SuSE guys (or other Fedora people) have a different opinion, but >I would bet heavily against that too.
Yeah, go ask the SuSE guys about their involvement with rpm.org, the last communication they ever had with Fedora was the RPM Summit nearly two years ago, with nothing ever happening or communication taking place since, with zero direct involvement in upstream development..
Maybe you should consider asking people about matters yourself before making up clueless speculations from your proud ignorance.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 22:23 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
"rpm.org actually introduced lzma payload compression in 4.6.0 using the format that changed, making use of it resulting in rpms useless by anyone.
The fixed support of rpm.org was contributed by myself after raising the issue and kicking and screaming on their list for like a half year before I got their attention."
rpm 4.8 support comes from
4.6 release had a prominent note
http://www.rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.6.0
"Experimental support for LZMA payloads has been added but this is unsupported as of 4.6.0 release, official support will be added in an update once a stable release of xz-utils (formerly lzma-utils) is available."
This is precisely the reason why Fedora didn't switchover to using lzma at that time and only switched over when the feature was not experimental anymore.
"Hah, yeah, you'd certainly have more faith and find yum's support for this more credible than what berkeley db has offered as functionality for years.."
This is a comparison between two different things are a different level. Doesn't seem that meaningful.
"Yeah, go ask the SuSE guys about their involvement with rpm.org, the last communication they ever had with Fedora was the RPM Summit nearly two years ago, with nothing ever happening or communication taking place since, with zero direct involvement in upstream development.."
They had communicated that they haven't allotted resources to upstream rpm development (this isn't a advantage for rpm5.org either) and haven't done much work but the amount of communication or patches are not zero.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 22:31 UTC (Tue) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
http://www.rpm.org/ticket/84 has nothing to do with payload support, it's only support for extracting lzma/xz compressed archives.
Here's the patch that added both proper lzma_alone & xz payload support http://lists.rpm.org/pipermail/rpm-maint/2009-March/00237... that rpm.org ended up adopting (where they didn't orginally even plan on supporting the legacy lzma_alone format that others were and are still using).
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 22:44 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 3, 2011 23:44 UTC (Tue) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 8:33 UTC (Wed) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]
(I am honestly just curious)
We do!
Posted May 4, 2011 10:42 UTC (Wed) by ffesti (guest, #74694) [Link]
In May 2007 Red Hat hired Panu Matilainen to take over the project. He started the 4.4.2.x series by collecting patches and bug fixes that where still lurking in bugzilla and other distributions and fixing bugs himself.
After one year it became clear that just one person could continue to do bug fixes forever. So there were two more people added to the project: Jindrich Novy and myself. This allowed us to do real development and new releases. Since then the project is not "halfway into" but back out of maintenance mode.
But as Jonathan correctly noticed the releases do neither focus on new features nor on transforming RPM into something else. Instead lots of work has been put in solving scalability issues and improving the code base. We believe that RPM - beside some ugly and awkward implementation details - does the right thing and the basic design - created one and a half decades ago - is still valid. We also believe that features added now should be prepared to survive a similar time span - especially when considering the long life time of today's enterprise distributions.
The other reason why the development of RPM does not look that spectacular is that there are several ten thousands of packages out there that need to continue to work - both building and installing. So every change has to be considered thoroughly. Packaging is a complicated topic and the implications are not always easy to foresee. Even simple looking bug fixes have hit packages relying on the broken behavior[*].
This makes the RPM project a not very contributor friendly environment. While we try to be more approachable the technical necessities make the RPM project a bad place for people seeking self-fulfilment. As a result the development is - and has always been - a "Red Hat show" with some individual contributions - most of them from other RPM based distributions.
So some people may consider RPM "boring". We developers consider it difficult, challenging, scary, complicated and exciting. But we also consider it as the stable foundation of our and many other distributions and a project that is going to be around for at least another decade and a half.
Florian Festi
[*] Special thanks to the Fedora Project that does the beta testing for us and keeps most of these incidents away from everyone else.
We do!
Posted May 4, 2011 11:00 UTC (Wed) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
You're absolutely right that the priorities and goals are different, which IMO is a good thing. :)
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 4, 2011 12:34 UTC (Wed) by devzero2000 (guest, #42159) [Link]
First calling rpm5 a fork is subject to interpretation: Jbj wrote about this here https://answers.launchpad.net/rpm/+question/124225 (Which version of rpm is a fork).
In any case perhaps it is a little know fact that also the major distro that use @rpm.org have a big pile of patch not upstream : so maybe the fork of RPM is larger than what you can think in general. Always on this point, Jeff Johnson asked all to join rpm5 in the past on the now defunct rpm-devel mailing list https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/rpm-devel/2007-Jun... ):
so was not a choice of rpm5 that rpm development today is based on a competitive model and not on a cooperative model.
Regarding the documentation I can be partly agree, but this was not considered in the past as a impediment on the development of rpm5 (in fact see my comment on this http://trainofthoughts.org/blog/2008/04/14/rpm-51-released/ ): today it may be more important, in my opinion, given that Mandriva and other Unix/Linux distro belenix, openindiana, IDMS ecc. - has decided to use rpm5: FWIW this is in my todo list for sure.
For example we at @rpm5 started writing FAQ on launchpad, and myself included will try to update the rpm5 documentation, as my time permit.
And, yes, there is much documentation to write and learn: just for example the integration of JavaScript, perl, ruby, with mongo DB in progress, with TPM, with SKS, the reunification of version compare with dpkg, the possible integration with a depsolver (probably a satsolver).
As I said rpm5 is also on launchpad, one of the biggest platforms for the management of open source projects,thanks to a beautiful idea of Jeff Johnson, as always:
with this @rpm5.org automatically track the rpm bugs or generic problem by many distributions, here we have blueprints, FAQ, questions, answers.
So not only the mailing lists. For who is interested look here:
https://launchpad.net/~rpm5 and https://launchpad.net/rpm
In fact RPM5 has a process of continuous integration, with buildbot for many distributions (take a look a O'Reilly Beautiful Testing for all of this), and all this with very little funds, little resource, with much difficulty, only thanks to the enormous and sustained effort of a person and with the help by some little other.
Just for example, i myself personally know that one of the biggest Italian bank are using RPM 5.1 in production on AIX and Solaris
and @ rpm5 has already offered support to IBM to migrate to the prehistoric version of RPM on AIX this @rpm5.org offert is always valid for everyone distro, UNIX vendor, i am pretty sure.
In short RPM5/RPM6/RPM7 has a long life ahead http://twitter.com/#!/RPM5FOREVER.
My answer would say something new about rpm5, after 4 years, on the contrary of this LWN article not very informative, in my opinion,
on what rpm5 is today and would like to do in the future.
Regards
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 5, 2011 11:35 UTC (Thu) by Ansus (guest, #74724) [Link]
Ark Linux announced plans to switch to RPM5 but current stable release uses RPM 4.4.5.
I think spreading rumors that many distros use RPM5 is just a hype.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 5, 2011 18:39 UTC (Thu) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 5, 2011 19:23 UTC (Thu) by Ansus (guest, #74724) [Link]
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 7, 2011 0:24 UTC (Sat) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
It's named dockyard and is the equivalent of mandriva's cooker.
If by your definition a stable distro has to be released first before using rpm5, we're not even using it either.. ;)
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 5, 2011 21:49 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]
> Alt Linux uses RPM 4.0.4
It's a heavily diverged fork based on 4_0_4. Two of its primary maintainers are also rpm5.org committers.
> and has no plans to switch to RPM5.
I'd rather just ask ldv@ next week in person but so far you've surprised me: there were no such plans published, but there was no denial to them either. As far as I know, ways are being considered. In the mean time, our company has developed a partial port of ALT Linux patch/macro set to rpm5 for Clustrx OS.
Just in case, I'm involved in ALT Linux Team since 2001 and affiliated with Massive Solutions Ltd by now.
> I think spreading rumors that many distros use RPM5 is just a hype.
Well, spreading hype is no good indeed. But rpm5 also seems like an attempt at macro set unification, which isn't likely with RH controlled branch FWIW.
PS: Mandriva's blitzkrieg on "upstream merge" seems to have resulted in the opposite: upstream alienation. I'd like to warn everyone that dealing with Dmitry Komissarov seems to play major role in stupid management decisions like (from my judgment) this one.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 7, 2011 0:21 UTC (Sat) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
And Dmitry Komissarov has nothing to do with our choice of rpm5, nor do I get what stupid management decission you're referring to either..
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 7, 2011 11:10 UTC (Sat) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]
rpm5.org rejection of hasty patches with subsequent access mods.
> Dmitry Komissarov has nothing to do with our choice of rpm5
Glad to hear that, actually. (and read up a bit on developer's discussion as well)
> what stupid management decission you're referring to either..
I've specifically noted "(from my judgment)" *asserting* that "feature pressure" was done downwards on developers, not a decision made by technically savvy. If it were rpm5 (or systemd, or any other part of the whole bunch) _alone_, I'd be less inclined to assert so.
During Russian school project, Dmitry has achieved something of a record on mismanagement -- managing to bring a successfully piloted project (by ALT Linux) to a full-scale grave. I spoke to him many times but he seems very much like a self assured moron unable to acknowledge his shortcomings, unfortunately.
I'd also like to warn that NGI fund seems to have lost in Russian government gamble, so there might be some sense to have a plan B for those working at Mandriva looking at how Sickola Narkozy regards free software, both national and in general.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 7, 2011 13:13 UTC (Sat) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
Basically a lot of required changes and new features was had to be rushed into rpm5 cvs, often under a #ifdef RPM_VENDOR_MANDRIVA for us to get where we wanted in time for our upcoming release, this is much due to lack of better revision control such as ie. git (which we're likely to move to soon) and the need for having changes mainttained upstream rather than locally patched, so for these to be both reviewed and also for Jeff to do continous integration with buildbots running cooker and building latest cvs code. Jeff's complaints was more of a result of me spending more time to get things done and code committed way later than was expected, thus misinterpreted, nothing whatsoever related to any feuds, big disagreements or anything. Our relation has always been good, so to others viewing it from the outside, the impression might be entirely messed up, not knowing much about what's not posted on the public list...
For the feature pressure, this has simply come from the community, and something I think is a great thing as we seem to be pulling it off nicely. :)
RPM5 is something I've been involved with over a few years now and has been trying to push for a long time, with new management finally taking interest in opinions and ideas of mine, in contrast to old one. Systemd is Andrey Borzenkov to be creditted, another community member which has done the major work and efforts related to systemd.
All in all, the experience with Dmitry within Mandriva is overwhelmingly positive with a quite favorable view by most, given our bad history with awful management in the past, I guess the bar wasn't set really high, but so far the level of sanity seen is far above average, something which has been more motivating than much else in a long, long time, leaving a very good atmosphere and environment within mandriva and community now, which a year ago was certainly not the case..
For Dmitry in relation to ALT & Russia, I can't speak, nor know much about it beyond some comments on why not going with ALT, which I'd rather not find appropriate disclosing in public. I can only say that you have my sympathies for any possible mismanagement or foul play that might've taken place with regards to your project...
I was always hoping for a closer collaboration with ALT Linux, and also hoping for increasing their involvement in rpm5.org and on sharing efforts on distribution, giving all the synergies shared and and their common history dating back to Russian Linux-Mandrake, and I still very much hope so for this to happen regardless of who wins the bid with the Russian government or not (hey, it might not be either of us, it could just as well be ASP Linux..;).
But rest assured, please do not interpret greater technical changes and activity wrt. cooker development as a direct consequence of Komissarov's involvement, it's rather more a result of greater influence and more development done by Conectiva now, which is a very good thing and quite promising in the long run.
I'm hoping this is not the last we speak, with the next occation being under better circumstances and of mutual benefits and interest. :)
--
Regards,
Per Øyvind
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 7, 2011 0:37 UTC (Sat) by Ansus (guest, #74724) [Link]
The list of committers also includes people from CentOS and Fedora. Do you claim that they also want to switch to RPM5? :-)
Actually people from Alt Linux expressed that they do not have any plans of migrating to RPM5 and discribed this article as disinformation as I pointed it to them.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 7, 2011 0:51 UTC (Sat) by Ansus (guest, #74724) [Link]
I am a maintainer and packager in openSUSE and I would say that the macro set in other modern distributions (Fedora, Mandriva) is rather compatible with ours. The only macros with which we have problems are icon update ones and of course with the names of the devel packages.
> But rpm5 also seems like an attempt at macro set unification, which isn't likely with RH controlled branch FWIW.
RPM5 is a way to break package compatibility between distributions first of all.
Anyway, I am sure that any migration to RPM5 cannot be justified with such behavior of the upstream. I read the Jeff's posts in the mailing list, his accusations of everybody around of being mentally ill etc and I would say that anybody who still wants to migrate to RPM5 should blame themselves for their stupidity.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 7, 2011 3:23 UTC (Sat) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
The macros and compatibility between suse, fedora and mandriva as currently is and has historically been isn't worth shit.
The move to rpm5 is rather to standardize packaging around upstream, and not by trying to solve it with awkward macros to get half-assed adopted somewhere here and there, but never remotely sufficient to be of much relevance.
And just by stating that you're a package maintainer in opensuse doesn't really give you that much credibility to have insight on matters beyond suse packaging, much less rpm internals itself, and by claiming that macro sets in other modern distributions is rather compatible with yours, you're just revealing how way off you really are..
If you think more consistent macros is the solutions to everything, good for you, but what we want to achieve, and what I'm working on related to rpm5 is actually on implementing proper functionality within rpm itself, to be automized, externalized from spec files, and reduce the huge crap pile of macros and feeble attempts of achieving compatibility with %if foo blablbla %endif.
JPackage is a brilliant example of how miserably failures such attempts usually are, we'd rather work on making such project superfluous...
But go on, your macros will probably lead you to the magic leprecon, taking you to the gold at the end of the rainbow..
But in the real world, there's a need for cleaner, simpler, and well-designed means to achieve any sensible form of compatibility..
If you read our mailing lists, then you should also notice that Jeff's responses are well warranted, even though a bit hot-headed and misinterpreting people occationally, something which you cannot blame him for considering people's behaviour and attitude..
Jeff has been the person over the last month who's actually been the most active and helpful on cooker, and also given us a huge boost in discussing new ideas and related r&d, while being frequently trashed by the same group of people with their own agenda.
You can find these same people having been especially active dating back to september since the mageia announcement, trolling and generally generating tension on the list before Jeff turned up as well..
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 7, 2011 13:48 UTC (Sat) by Ansus (guest, #74724) [Link]
I have ported hundreds of packages from other RPM distros and as I can say, the only places where you have to place %if...%endif most often are the BuildRequires tags due to different package names and the update-desktop-files machinery.
(offtopic) from .desktop accounting department
Posted May 9, 2011 12:42 UTC (Mon) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]
...which is best done by a posttrans trigger IMO&X.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 7, 2011 13:50 UTC (Sat) by Ansus (guest, #74724) [Link]
From what I saw he attacked completely uninvolved people for even friendly questions.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 7, 2011 13:55 UTC (Sat) by Ansus (guest, #74724) [Link]
In fact it will only split package format among distributions removing any hope of reconciliation. Or do you hope that Fedora will switch to RPM5 also? Speaking for openSUSE, it values compatibility with Fedora and will not switch either.
What even worse is that RPM5 breaks not only spec files compatibility, but also makes binary formats incompatible.
Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)
Posted May 6, 2011 3:44 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]
With that in mind, RPM failure is probably better handled by btrfs and a care that user-generated and distribution-generated data are on differing filesystems (which brings us neatly to the FHS revision, the other topic on LWN at the moment, and the thought that /var/lib/rpm may not be the best location for the RPM database).
yet another peripeteia in the rpm5 saga
Posted May 7, 2011 10:09 UTC (Sat) by vstinner (subscriber, #42675) [Link]
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 7, 2011 15:06 UTC (Sat) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]
Well, Dmitry Komissarov's management style has made him an enemy in my person either -- since he has personally harrassed Alexey Novodvorsky and tried to appropriate Stanislav Ievlev's work[1].They've performed an attempt at headhunting campain after ALT Linux Team folks (this has followed raiding the Russian school project).
The former vice minister in education was involved in a group including Komissarov while also being a co-owner of "IT Academy" which was granted training part of that project and failed it spectacularly[2].
So far things look like:
- the government has heard of Linux and knows that local expertise does matter;
- this seems to have led Komissarov to form Rosalab (to qualify for "Russian Linux", after PingWinSoft got heavily contaminated for being a raider) and presumably to the replacement of French developers with Brasilian ones "to cut costs down"[3].
But so far they seem to have failed to execute or at least to deceive well enough.
[1] archived copy (in Russian; see 2010-07-12 06:40 and 2010-07-12 10:57)
[2] here's a cheat sheet (in Russian) by which one can judge the level of teacher training: e.g., "which [ooimpress] menu lets to set up a mouse click action: Help, Format, *Slide show*, Customize"...
[3] I can dig up the company source for that phrase in my archive but it seems to have been public anyway; I know of previous Mandrake/Conectiva merger.
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 7, 2011 15:39 UTC (Sat) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
Conectiva employees certainly has a lower costs which is a valuable factor, but this is *not* what caused the people at Edge-IT to leave at all.
What happened was that most people at Edge-IT was offered a new contract with Mandriva, with a few people not being offered a new contract, which was the primary reason for most of the Edge-IT people leaving Mandriva.
Mandriva has hired several people in France since and is still actively hiring, me personally, I'm even from Norway, and if you know anything about Norway, you should know that hiring people from here is expensive (and pretty much everything in this country is) and that people are used to way higher salaries than most other places around. So while it's expensive to live in Norway, people generally doesn't suffer as people make good earnings.
The situation has actually been kinda amusing, making Sweden the Mexico of Scandinavia, due to high unemployment in Sweden these days, a *lot* of young people come from Sweden to take jobs Norwegians are too lazy to take themself, while Norwegians goes across the border to buy booze, sigarettes, pr0n, party ++ for extremely cheap prices compared to Norway.. :p
Also for what Conectiva concerns, after NGI investment got approved, their employees got considerable salary raises, at please to most people over there, so I would ask you not to make too many assumptions about exploitation, mandriva merger etc., especially not speculating on these in public.
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 7, 2011 19:06 UTC (Sat) by Ansus (guest, #74724) [Link]
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 16, 2011 16:53 UTC (Mon) by DKomissarov (guest, #74949) [Link]
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 8, 2011 0:50 UTC (Sun) by misc (guest, #73730) [Link]
The primary reason for Edge-it people to leave was not that they were not offered a contract to work again, but because most ( if not all ) didn't trusted the management anymore ( this and the fact that the company was closed of course ). Of the previous Edge-it people ( around 20 people IIRC, likely less ), only 1 person signed again to work to Mandriva.
And I will remind that Mandriva being under chapter 11 protection ( or rather french equivalent ), they couldn't hire anyone except for replacing people leaving. Edge-it contract was also more advantageous for the company ( less paid holidays ) than Mandriva one as it was negotiated, so basically almost all R&D people working in France on the community distribution were working for Edge-IT
The support was half edge-it, half Linbox, and the team for research was Mandriva ( european contracts as Mancoosi, EDOS projects, etc ).
I was at the party to celebrate the end of Edge-it, I had time to discuss a lot of this, and lack of trust in Mandriva management is even cited as one of the reason of creating Mageia ( http://www.mageia.org/en/#announce ).
Moreover, the fact that only some people have been offered a contract is likely a violation of the french laws, as companies are forced in case of economic bankruptcy to do their best to offer a contract, see L1233-4 of the "code du travail".
Even after that part of the story, there was several people leaving since the 6 previous months. The CFO of Mandriva ( Stanislas Bois ) left last month, as well as Vanessa Wall who left 10 days ago ( she was in charge of communication ).
Among others people that I personally knew that left the company is Cedric Delfosse, a old time Linbox employee ( who I worked with some years ago ), and Benjamin Jorand, sysadmin who left in november, letting for a few week no one in charge of svn server except a member of the community.
There was around 15/20 people in the french part of the company and so 4 people leaving in 6 months is a rather high turn-over rate ( around 40% per year at this rate ).
So if they are hiring in France, that's mainly because people are leaving now and leaved before ( fcrozat, pterjan, etc ).
Speaking of Brasil part, we can see that Alexandre Possebom left 2 days ago ( http://twitter.com/#!/possebom/status/66540933826609152 ), the xorg maintainer left 2 months ago ( http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2011-03/msg00365.php ) and it seems that Mandriva didn't found someone to take care of xorg since ( http://forum.mandriva.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=134... ).
Herton Ronaldo Krzesinski ( kernel, glibc ) left for Canonical around 3 months ago ( https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/2/24/287 ). So the situation doesn't seem better there.
Yet, the situation is not so bad as Mandriva 2011 is going to ship as a rc in a few days and final in a 1 month ( unless there is huge planning change, and such last minute modification without discussing with community would be yet another communication error, eroding the remaining trust ).
I would also agree with you and not call this exploitation ( after all, people are paid corresponding to the cost of life of the country in every part of the world and so that's not different from any others company ), but engineers in Brasil are cheaper than in Europa and do the same good job, so yes, it will be seen as unfair.
Mandriva as a company survived to this kind of crisis quite often ( and had to face it too often in the previous years ), yet I do not think that unwarranted optimism due to forgetting some important public facts is a good way to earn back the trust of community.
And that's only for the public facts, if you ask to your future french colleagues, they will explain that their situation today is a bit different than the one you describe.
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 9, 2011 13:06 UTC (Mon) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 10, 2011 0:28 UTC (Tue) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
For the real reasons, every Edge-IT employee I spoke with before leaving said that while they did like the new plans of the new investors, they did leave exactly because the few people who weren't offered a new contract, which made them feel like Mandriva wouldn't be the same place to work anymore, thus declining the contract.
People should rather start asking *who* weren't offered a new contract, and what could be the cause of this?
Firing people is a costly process and gives legal hazzles, terminating them during liquidation of a company is a convenient way to do so without technically doing it, just saying.. Not stating..
Having more insight on these details than you probably have, and also about current situation with daily contact with colleagues and management, I think I know more than you'd happen to know and would have the possibility to learn currently, especially considering many of your rants, speculations, lies about mine and others' employment and what not has sort of made you a persona-non-grata amongst several people within company, so I truly doubt you're up to date on many things..
For those not being offered a new contract, for those I know, I can only say way overdue, might sound a bit harsh, but since 2007 I've been seriously considered to abandon the project, driven away just as intended by some of these people..
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 10, 2011 9:20 UTC (Tue) by boklm (guest, #34568) [Link]
I've not heard anyone saying they liked the new plans of the new investors. Actually I don't know how it's possible to like a new plan that you know nothing about.
People were explained by Jean Noel de Galzain that they need not know about what their plans are, it's not their job, "just shut up and go back to your coding".
By the way, nobody was offered a new contract before the declaration of cessation of payments. Some people were offered one after, but leaving edge-it to join mandriva at this time could only be done with some skulduggery.
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 11, 2011 22:41 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]
Good luck, folks. We all need a bit of it from time to time.
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 16, 2011 16:45 UTC (Mon) by DKomissarov (guest, #74949) [Link]
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted Jun 18, 2011 13:50 UTC (Sat) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 12, 2011 8:25 UTC (Thu) by misc (guest, #73730) [Link]
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 14, 2011 23:08 UTC (Sat) by proyvind (guest, #74683) [Link]
read and be sure to understand what's being written and meant, in stead of just picking out parts of context and apply speculative rhetorics in public (where those actually implied usually aren't), and you wouldn't achieve any claims of such..
It's impossible to understand whether there lies any motivations or intended intentions or anything behind what you write (and to be fair, I know you better to make any assumptions of maliciousness or particular agenda), but the conclusions others draw from it and the consequences there of are quite frustrating and often devastating..
I personally find it extremely tiring and discouraging when I repeteadly find others discussing claims regarding me, my character and technical matters in public and behind my back, rather than with me directly. For me personally the result is my credibility, competence and work being undermined, which again has consequences affecting those whom I'm affiliated with..
While I know better than that you'd have any personal vendetta against me, I know for a fact there's several others who do, and to those, you only provide fuel..
I'm extremely tired and fed up, and I'll most likely do my best staying out of public for a period, hoping for others to try their best respect my privacy. Thx.
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted May 16, 2011 17:13 UTC (Mon) by DKomissarov (guest, #74949) [Link]
- not citizen of Russia
- not employee of ALT Linux
say anything in behalf of this company about russian educational projects.
yet another peripeteia in the mandriva saga
Posted Jun 18, 2011 13:49 UTC (Sat) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]
would you please learn some basic English to write properly,
or get someone with basic English skills to fix your braindamage,
or better yet, just sit quiet and pretend to be smart?
Since *you* are the bastard who actually ruined the Russian school project.
TIA