FAQ

Why are you doing this?

Now that is a good question, and one I ask myself once in a while. Let’s just say that yum and rpm are very entrenched in the distributions that ship them, and there is no denying that replacing rpm with all its quirks is a daunting task.

Is razor really replacing rpm?

Yes and no. The rpm fileformat is pretty solid and extendable and razor doesn’t change that. Also, the rpm spec file format, the build process etc is outside the scope of the razor project. What razor does replace, is what you could call the rpm runtime. It’s the database of packages on your system, the installation processes and the query functionality. The motivation for extending the scope to also include the rpm runtime, is that a lot of the problems that people often attribute to yum are actually rpm deficiencies. Slow installation, corrupted package database, inconsistent depsolving rules between rpm and yum are all issues with rpm.

Why not use a standard database library for the storage backend?