gundy dot org

I’ve been checking out rPath and Conary. I know rPath has ties to Red Hat, but let’s forget that for now. The technology is very, very cool. From what I can tell, it has serious advantages over rpm and yum|apt|up2date combo.

Besides local package management, it makes it easy to fork the distro. Why would anyone want that?! Well, people don’t really want to fork anything, they just want a few things that aren’t currently offered, so they take the distro they know (often RHEL or Debian) and start making changes. Usually it’s more work then they can keep up with and things fall apart. If they do “make it” the deltas get bigger and bigger until any benefit that comes from the fork is lost.

What if distros encouraged a community of hackers around their base distro? As long as they don’t steal customers, don’t burden the Upstream Providers (UP) with support and offer clean patches, wouldn’t that be welcome? Isn’t it a complement of sorts to be forked? And, what if the UP made it so easy to keep in sync that small projects could actually thrive and stick around long enough to give something back to the UP? At the very least, more and more people would learn how to run a system that’s like the UP, and those skills would port if they ever switched to the UP’s distro. I’m thinking more then just SRPMS, I’m thinking a Conary based distro and repos.

So really, we’re not talking about a “hostile fork” in the classic sense. We are talking about a “loving spoon.” It seems to me that once the sweetness that is Conary becomes more and more common place (and I believe it will), there will be great value in being the distro that people choose as the root of their distro. That sounds like a good fit for Fedora Core, or even better, RHEL or Debian. One would think that Red Hat and Debian would want to preempt each other with such a move.

As it stands, rPath is nicely positioned to lead out in this space. Currently their interests are focused on appliances, but what about general purpose distros? That can’t be that far behind. I for one, will be looking at rPath to use as a base for one of my projects. Plus, the guys over at rPath are super helpful. I wish them the best (if Red Hat and Debian sit on their hands in this regard, it looks like rPath just might get it).

Anyone see where I’m going with this? Does anyone agree? Anyone think I’m nuts?

I leave you with a bit this fitting 1966 classic by the LOVIN’ SPOONFUL:

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn’t it a pity
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head…