Re: [MiNT] opkg / coldmint

[Jean-François Lemaire <jflemaire@skynet.be>]

On Saturday 16 February 2013 16:24:22 Mathias Wittau wrote:
 
> Of course it is good that things can be done by personal taste. But
> sometimes I am wondering why it seems to be that complicated to agree upon
> (some) directions to go. Wouldn´t it be wise to discuss it, and pic one or
> two possibilities together, with the aim to follow it the next decade? So
> the remaining forces could be clustered, and developers could support each
> other in better ways?
> 
> If I understood the issue correctly, Easy MiNT will become very hard now,
> as packages for another packaging system are not done anymore. So why not
> working together and reaching more collective? Thats no offence against
> opkg!

Yes, the rpm packages that EasyMiNT uses are becoming quite obsolete (some of 
them at least).

I think it's possible to add a bit of objective criticism at this point. I've 
used RPM (SpareMiNT) on my Falcon for years, and before that on my TT, and it 
was always fast to install/query/remove a package (needless to say, it can 
only be even faster on a FireBee).

I remember that Mark had even started to develop a GEM application (SpareMiNT 
Update Manager) that made it easy to update the packages via a mouse click. 
SUM could also be used via the command line. Very promising stuff that pleases 
everybody! It was not finished but was already useful and the whole process 
was /fast/.

On the other hand, ebuilds (Gentoo/FreeMiNT) are excruciatingly slow. A simple 
"emerge --search" command to look up a package name takes /minutes!/ And I'm 
not talking about installing packages from sources, I'm talking about a simple 
query of the database (or whatever it's called).

If OPKG is also very slow, well, this means RPM wins by a mile the real-world 
usability contest :-)

Where does this leave us? Either we focus on a real package management system 
and in this case I don't see any other realistic option than RPM; or, we 
forget about the packaging system altogether and simply compile every package 
that we need as a tar archive and install it by hand, without any kind of 
package management.

Maintaining a package management system that is actually unusable because it's 
too slow is a waste of time since nobody will ever use it.

To end on a pessimistic note: my suspicion is that fewer and fewer developers 
are interested in any of this stuff because they only boot up their Atari 
machines to test/run things developed on a more modern computer. I respect 
their choice but it means that the new machine (the FireBee) will never be 
able to be presented to the larger public as anything more than an "upgraded 
Falcon".

But I digress.

Cheers,
JFL
-- 
Jean-François Lemaire