Re: Call For Articles

[Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com>]

Ingo Ruhnke wrote:

> > We have a game we packaged in RPM format and we wanted to know how we
> > could make a "small download" that was okay with the RPM database. I
> > mean, I could make a tar.gz with an update script, but if you then did
> > an "rpm -V", it would scream at the "corrupted" files...
> 
> Don't know how to handle that, anybody with some rpm knowlege? The
> easiest solution could be to patch the old rpm directly and than
> reinstall it, because that will avoid the need to play arround in the
> directory tree.

This would require keeping the old RPM around... I fear that with the
compression and everything, this would get me a really big patch anyway
(my "patch" program for my resource file removes and adds stuff to the
resource file at the resource level).

> > A mini-tutorial on how to do a proper installation script for .tar.gz
> > binary distributions would be nice too...
> 
> But an installation script isn't that important if you have a tar.gz,
> since most people should know how to handle this, since elsewere they
> wouldn't been able to extract the tar.gz to get the install script ;-)
> And I personaly don't like install scripts, since you have to do the
> work twice, extract the file, then run the script and the script will
> places the files in their directories, a simple:
> 
> $ cd /usr/local
> $ tar xzf ~/GAME-bin.tar.gz
> 
> Doesn't look that difficult.

Personally, I don't like that much... This has to be "user friendly"...
I was thinking about something in the lines of the Netscape Communicator
installation, with everything it does documented in a file, so that
hackers (and RPM builders) can do it by hand and simple users can have
it easy.

-- 
Pierre Phaneuf
Ludus Design, http://ludusdesign.com/
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. Then you win." -- Gandhi