[Apt-Rpm] rpm 5.0.0 released

[Panu Matilainen]

On Sat, 5 Jan 2008, David Halik wrote:
>
> Panu,
>
> I was just curious if there is going to be future development towards
> compatibility with rpm5.org's 5.0.0 release. I've been testing out JBJ's
> beta releases for sometime, so it's great to hear it finally went
> stable. Any idea what the future roadmap for apt-rpm and rpm releases is
> going to be?

I don't have any concrete roadmap in mind, my time for apt-rpm development 
is so irregular these days it's hard to make plans that would have a 
prayer of a chance of happening in the planned schedule :-/

Doesn't mean I haven't thought about the issue though. With the plethora 
of rpm versions out there, and now two forks and their versions to 
support... The rpm code in apt-rpm is half ifdefs already, down that road 
some day it'll be totally unsupportable unless something is done about it. 
Cutting out support for old rpm versions is not really an option (despite 
what I've said in the past) as large amount of apt-rpm userbase is there 
solely because it works across old and new distros.

I've been toying with the idea of stuffing all the rpm specifics into a 
separate library (lets call it librpm++ for now, for it'd be a generic C++ 
rpm library, not apt specific) and port apt-rpm to use the library, 
completely insulating apt-rpm from rpm versioning dirty details. To 
accomplish that, the library would have to be pretty high on abstraction: 
not a single "raw" rpm symbol or header can be visible in the public API 
of it. That way, adding support for whatever rpm versions could happen 
in librpm++, without even requiring apt-rpm to be rebuilt to switch the 
"backend" rpm version.

Back to your actual question: the vague idea is to finally get out the 
next stable version of apt-rpm out, soon (what remains is various little 
details, nothing much - just a matter of actually kicking myself to do 
it). After that, looks like I don't have much choice but to deal with the 
fork situation. So after the current in-development version goes out as 
stable, I'll try to concentrate on the "portability" issue. But don't ask 
me *when* this is going to happen ;)

 	- Panu -