Matt Jones' Blog

I really, really, really want feedback on this:

Over the past few months, I’ve really gotten into packaging on Fedora and Ubuntu. I’m not an expert, but I can genuinely say our packaging situation is crap. We are so close. And yet we ended up with two major implementations, that are almost the same. There is no significant difference between RPM and Dpgk.

So will Fedora abandon their 15,000 packages and choose Dpkg? Will Debian abandon their 35,000 packages and choose RPM? No. Neither will. There is no way for them to transition. And they will not give up their self branded solution. The only way forward is to make a new system, that is both better, and backwards compatible with RPM and Dpkg.

That is what I have been toying with for the past few months. It is called Packagetastic and It is a replacement for Dpkg and RPM, but still backwards compatible with them. Right now it is just a proof of concept, but can build many small packages on Ubuntu and Fedora.

I made a screencast to show how it works. This is just a simple, introduction. More example on how to use it will come soon. You can view the screencast below:

packagetastic_1.ogv (96.2 MB)

More information about the project can be found here: http://launchpad.net/packagetastic

Please provide your criticism and feedback at the mailing list, this blog post, or my identica page.

I just tried pushing a bazaar branch, and got a scary message that said “WARNING: POSSIBLE DNS SPOOFING DETECTED!”. Turns out my web host (dreamhost) moved my site to a new server. The error was because the RSA key had changed. I had to poke around to confirm that it was legit, and not a spoof.

But hot damn, that made my heart beat. I’m glad my everyday tools “just work”, with things that can confirm the box is the same.