Re: FAQ - revised ... again :)

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

On Sat, 30 Oct 1999, Karlis Loen wrote:

> I'll let you know how well Slack 7 handles RPMs.  (ala rpm.tgz...)

It uses either an rpm to cpio converter, or an rpm->cpio->tgz converter

It works fine, with one catch:

It will not work unless:

(a)	You have the right versions of libc and libstdc++ on your
	system	
(b)	All the right versions of the other required shared libs
	are on your system *AND* were compiled against the same libc and
	libstdc++ versions as the executables.
	
In practice, it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. It usually doesn't
work unless the user knows what they are doing.

> And an RPM is just a tarball if you change the extension anyway.  Try it
> sometime.  <g>

No, it's not. It's a CPIO archive, with some extra structure stuck on top 
( a header which includs dependency info, pre/post install scripts, MD5
checksums, and other stuff )

Cheers,
-- 
Donovan