[OE-core] trying to reconcile OE builds with rpm4-format rpm files built on centos 6

[Joshua G Lock]

On Thu, 2016-04-21 at 08:24 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Apr 2016, Burton, Ross wrote:
> > 
> > On 21 April 2016 at 13:06, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>
> > wrote:
> >         next bit of muttering is, "can we downgrade the OE build to
> > use
> >       rpm4-format packages?", which is not a path down which i want
> > to walk.
> > 
> > 
> > Assuming that the obviously correct option of "build the packages
> > inside OE" really is being written off for mysterious reasons, rpm4
> > was only just removed from oe-core (though depending on what
> > releases you're using you may have never noticed it be added and
> > removed again).  So you could just recover that from history
> > (oe-core a6e7a86f1635be9a688c56c25e9d215ea4d2cc84 removed it) and
> > fix it up.
>   under the circumstances, that sounds like the simplest approach.
> would we be losing any significant functionality downgrading to rpm4?
> it's not my first choice, but if all that's required is to do basic
> installs and upgrades, i suspect it will work just fine.

On the topic of RPM4 vs. RPM5 you should be able to find more details
in the list archives, I easily found a brief summary by Mark Hatle in
the Yocto Project mailing list archive:

"There are some specific uses of RPM 4 in the YP, but I do caution
against people just using it "because".  The RPM 5 version is generally
better suited for the embedded world.  (There are been posts on more
reasons on the oe-core lists in the past.  But as quick summary --
dynamic architecture support, better cross compilation support, cross-
endian support, more configurable for custom distributions, etc.)"
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.embedded.yocto.general/28654/

We ended up removing RPM4 support because it was clear that it was
broken when using SMART as a package manager and we didn't have the
resources to fix it, nor any objections to its removal.

Some recent examples of the kinds of breakage:
https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8968
https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8969

Regards,

Joshua