[OE-core] rpm: Recover RPM4 to OE-core

[Joshua Lock]

On Fri, 2016-10-07 at 12:19 +0900, Fan Xin wrote:
> Hi Joshua,
> 
> Thanks for your info.
> 
> Actually, our origin motivation is that we found smartpm is not 
> maintained any more. We maintain smartpm for our distro at
> https://github.com/ubinux/smart2

Indeed, the lack of maintenance for Smart is one of the reasons we're
looking to switch away from it.

> Then we realize smartpm should switch to python3. In order to solve
> this 
> issue, there are four solutions as follows.
> 
> [1] smart/RPM5
> [2] smart/RPM4
> [3] dnf/RPM5
> [4] dnf/RPM4
> 
> I confirm that RPM5 have some bugs with python3 and I am not
> familiar 
> with RPM. So I think the easy way to solve this issue is [2],
> recover 
> RPM4 and solve the bugs in smartpm.
> 
> > 
> > 
> > It's also worth pointing out that we're strongly considering
> > dropping
> > SMART in the next (2.3) development cycle[4].
> > 
> Considering YP would like to drop smart in 2.3, I wonder YP would
> use 
> [3]dnf/RPM5 or [4]dnf/RPM4 ?

There are two main reasons we want to switch away from Smart. Firstly
we made a concerted effort to switch to Python3 in the 2.2 cycle —
Smart is one of the few recipes in OE-Core which still pulls in
Python2, maybe the only one we use by default (for RPM using distros).

Secondly Smart is unmaintained and has several known issues related to
its abstraction over package backends.

So far as I'm aware no decision has been made as to what we'll replace
Smart with yet. I believe the first step will be to investigate RPM5 &
dnf.

Regards,

Joshua