Author Topic: RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?  (Read 10937 times)

Dariusz Piatkowski

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1316
  • Karma: +26/-0
    • View Profile
RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?
« on: May 24, 2017, 02:21:08 am »
This is a bit of a vent/rant, but I figured that's what the forum is for where I can share my experience at the very least, and if I am DEAD wrong, I want to hear from you guys.

So recently I logged a ticket for the RPM team (http://trac.netlabs.org/rpm/ticket/254)

My ANPM installation was failing to update the 'rpm' package. The log contained information which I uploaded to the ticket. The individual who picked up my ticket, alias 'diver', right from the start assumed that I could apparently read his mind and despite the fact that I requested multiple times that he provide detailed CLI command to troublshoot the issue with, he failed to do so.

Finally I got fed up with the BS. You see, I have some 20+ yrs of IS industry experience, a lot of it at the front line(s) of customer support, and given the type of bahaviour I saw in this ticket exchange I can tell you plain and simple: no corporation would allow a customer to face such poor behaviour. I stated so in the ticket, at which point in time I was told point blank by 'dmaik': "...your behavior is clearly arrogant...".

Am I the only one to encounter this? I do not know who these individuals are, although I am guessing who 'dmaik' maybe be. Anyways, what floors me is that in such a small community that OS/2 is today we still have this type of an attitude, that almost condesending "I know stuff and you do not" type of a talk-down.

I am only familiar with the OS/2 version of the RPM/YUM implementation. Given my current use of this process it is clearly buggy and/or maybe the logic is not sound. I have now had multiple issues with either failed updates, or most often pre-requisites that the RPM/YUM do not respect. The RPM team, whoever they may be, simply do not get that, or they simply do not wish to understand the full level of problems that the extended user community faces, or so it feels at the moment.

Roderick Klein

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 653
  • Karma: +14/-0
    • View Profile
Re: RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?
« Reply #1 on: May 24, 2017, 03:00:15 am »
I read the ticket and I am not going to comment on the discussion itself.

What is however something that I keep hearing in *general* from  developers who write *free* software is that they get or gotten people demanding things. How much did you pay for this software ?

The punch line is that its free software the YUM/RPM software and the team at BWW is not a large software development house like IBM used to be. And they are working on a whole bunch of projects.
I edited this post to add the following:
I organized Warpstock Europe 2017 in Rotterdam and I will soon put there presentation online so you can what they all work on.

What we as a community should rather take into account is how much developers can handle (workload) ? Do you know what they (BWW) receive in there mailbox on more complaints.
« Last Edit: May 24, 2017, 03:14:11 am by Roderick Klein »

Roderick Klein

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 653
  • Karma: +14/-0
    • View Profile
Re: RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?
« Reply #2 on: May 24, 2017, 03:08:20 am »
What I am trying to bring across is that the developers we have are already overloaded and you do not know what more emails arrive in there mailbox. And why do you think BWW is asking for sponsorunits ?

You see that is why I asked you, how much money did you pay ? If you look at BWW Silvan runs his own company next to BWW. Herwig runs his own accountancy company with 2 people.
They do this NEXT to running BWW.  Looking how much projects BWW keeps running, imagine the time constraints.

The OS/2 community should *count*  the blessings that people are willing to work on OS/2 projects. Because we have very few developers. And my experience is that they get also private emails with complaints, we do not know how many emails these are and what is written in them.  Especially since most if not all of the software BWW releases is downloaded by most people free of charge,

Now if everybody would be paying for the services of BWW it would be a whole other case, but I do not think that is the case.

Dave Yeo

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 4775
  • Karma: +99/-1
    • View Profile
Re: RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?
« Reply #3 on: May 24, 2017, 03:20:31 am »
Hi  Dariusz,
Rule one, stay away from the experimental repository unless you're really knowledgeable.
Rule two, RPM is a piece of crap and porting it to OS/2 isn't going to change that. Unluckily RPM is what the developers are used to using and know, as it is commonly used in enterprise so we're stuck with it. As Roderick says, we get what we pay for and Bitwise has delivered quite a bit of software which has kept our platform alive.
As for what Silvan wanted, simply open a command prompt and run
Code: [Select]
yum update
Also we all need to remember that many of us speak languages natively besides English which can make communication awkward, especially online.
« Last Edit: May 24, 2017, 03:23:18 am by Dave Yeo »

Dariusz Piatkowski

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1316
  • Karma: +26/-0
    • View Profile
Re: RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?
« Reply #4 on: May 24, 2017, 05:30:10 am »
Roderick and Dave,

Guys, great feedback from both of you.

So why am I so particularly pissed about this?

Well, it is funny you say "you get what you pay for"...sure, I understand that.  To make it easier to deal with this aspect of our hobby that is also why I have donated/purchased the various sponsoring units in the past...w/o digging through my confirmation emails I honestly can not tell you how many times I've done that, nor which specific project or groups I supported, but I will tall you that I had ABSOLUTELY no problem trying to do my little 'part' of helping with the big picture.

I will say this, my contributions over the most recent couple of years have gone towards things such as:
1) OpenOffice
2) SystemLoad / RDesktop
3) NetDrive
4) PMView Pro
5) AN Device Driver Subscription
6) and various individuals: Unix ports or KO Myung-Hun's MPlayer to name a couple

Therefore, in short, my issue is not due to a proverbial "entitlement" some end-users at times exhibit, especially around Open Source projects, I do completely understand that. My issue instead is with what appears to be a very low level of "professionalism" I am encoutering, and it also does not happen to be a one-off example.

Silvan in fact is the very same person whom I exchanged several emails with just a little over 6 months ago regarding supporting/funding the team for the OpenOffice build...so to have him nearly have a "hissy fit" over my request in the ticket for detailed instructions just seems literally childish...??? I just don't get it...if it's a matter of too many projects then he should pull out of the stuff he clearly can not support and either arrange for a smooth transition to someone else or simply state that something like PRM/YUM can not be maintained on the OS/2 platform. Heck, for those of us who chose to transition out of the old ZIP driven DLL bucket into the RPM/YUM thing it would at least create a more realistic picture of what we can and can not count on within this OpenSource model.

We should all be interfacing with each other in much better ways, especially in such a small community as our OS/2 group is today.

drjohnnyfever

  • Guest
Re: RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?
« Reply #5 on: May 24, 2017, 10:39:05 am »
I think there is a bit of an impedance mismatch between all the various parties involved. We have Arca Noae selling commercially supported software, we have netlabs providing community supported ports and tools, we have ANPM, a free tool from Arca Noae.

I can understand both sides and certainly think there are way that ticket could have been handled with everyone being happy. There is certainly no excuse for rudeness but rudeness doesn't always translate equally in text. Sometimes if someone comes across as rude in a post its best to give them the benefit of the doubt.


guzzi

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 331
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
Re: RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?
« Reply #6 on: May 24, 2017, 01:59:02 pm »
Dariusz,

I just read the ticket. The most important issue is in the first line that diver wrote: "You can't update rpm alone". He also wrote: "As a yum update should work of course", which is the CLI command.So, first you nseemed to have missed that first info, then diver failed to clearly indicate that what he wrote was the CLI command. It goes from bad to worse after that. Clearly miscommunication for which you are as much to to blame as the other party. My advice: apologise for the misunderstandings and possible overreactions  on your part and ask to reopen the ticket. See what happens from there.
 

Pete

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1281
  • Karma: +9/-0
    • View Profile
Re: RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?
« Reply #7 on: February 05, 2018, 09:50:18 pm »
Hi All

I fired up ANPM on my eCS2.2b2 system and selected to update rpm and associated files.

That failed with this message displayed:-

[u'ERROR with transaction check vs depsolve:', 'rpm = 4.13.0-10.oc00 is needed by rpm-python-4.13.0-10.oc00.i686',
'rpm.dll is needed by rpm-python-4.13.0-10.oc00.i686',
'rpmbuild.dll is needed by rpm-python-4.13.0-10.oc00.i686',
'rpmio.dll is needed by rpm-python-4.13.0-10.oc00.i686',
u'Please report this error at http://trac.netlabs.org/rpm/']


I thought the yum/rpm stuff was supposed to work without problems...

Hunting around for answers I found this thread which is very much related.

As a result I opened a cmd window in \usr\bin and ran yum update.

All seemed to go well until the end where I see displayed:-

   Rpmdb checksum is invalid: dCDPT (pkg checksums)


Is that anything to be concerned about? - ANPM seems to show all updates were successful...


Regards

Pete




guzzi

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 331
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
Re: RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?
« Reply #8 on: February 05, 2018, 10:12:04 pm »

   Rpmdb checksum is invalid: dCDPT (pkg checksums)


Is that anything to be concerned about? - ANPM seems to show all updates were successful...


That is a known defect, can be ignored.

Rene Hvidsoe

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 52
  • Karma: +1/-0
    • View Profile
Re: RPM team issues, anyone else had this experience?
« Reply #9 on: February 05, 2018, 10:34:02 pm »
Hi,

Have you tried to update to the new version of AN package manager. It solved some of my issues incl. the one you have.
https://www.arcanoae.com/resources/downloadables/arca-noae-package-manager/


Best Regards
Rene