OLPC-Update + RPMs WAS:Re: OLPC XO Opera browser as Sugar activity

[Erik Garrison]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 12:30:14AM +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 12:20 AM, Erik Garrison <erik at laptop.org> wrote:
> > We already have yum installed on the XO.  Why are we not using it to
> > implement software update procedures?
> >
> > There are several reasons which occur to me:
> >
> >  1) OLPC software developers mostly use apt-based systems and have been
> > slow to adopt rpm-based ones.
> >
> >  2) Many have expressed frustration with yum, the user-friendly package
> > manager interface to rpm.  Even simple operations (yum search) will
> > download megabyte-order header files every time these headers change
> > unless yum is instructed not to (with the '-C' flag).  More
> > problematically, rpm refers to dependencies on a file-by-file level,
> > instead of package level, increasing the space and processing complexity
> > of rpm package management operations relative to deb-based tools, which
> > track dependencies on a (coarser) package level.
> >
> >  3) The tools we have created work well enough to not halt software
> > development and deployment.  Therefore there has been insufficient
> > pressure to move away from them.
> >
> > I don't think any of these reasons outweighs the benefits of migrating
> > to rpm/yum for software distribution.
> >
> > Objections?  Thoughts?
> 
> 
> Something that comes to my mind is the potential memory usage issues
> some people have been seeing while trying to use yum. A description of
> one such case is in
> http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Moving-to-metacity-with-composition-(was%3A-Preparing-for-the-feature-freeze)-p17621634.html
> 

I believe that this is somewhat related to (2), but because of our
uniquely low system memory it is XO-specific.  I have experienced
similar problems (OOM) using apt on an XO running debian.  I have also
watched yum fail repeatedly when working on slightly unreliable network
connections (and on restart repeat most of the work it had already
done).  These issues should be considered fixable bugs and not
showstoppers. 

I mentioned this to Dennis Gilmore and he said that the OOM issue was
known.  Seth Vidal (yum author) has been provided an XO on which to test
yum, so perhaps we could raise the memory pressure issue with him to see
if we he can resolve it.

Erik