Re: Call For Articles

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>]

Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com> writes:

> Ingo Ruhnke wrote:
 
>> 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).

I thought about unpacking the rpm (rpm2cpio or so), patching it and
than repack it. But of course that is not really something I want to
do. Reloading the new rpm would be much simpler.
 
>> 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:
 
> 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.

The problem is that this will only work with CD-Rom distribution, on
the Internet that is probably worthless. Since the install script
would be have to be downloaded seperatly, that would cause that some
would forget to download it, other download it to another directory
that the tar.gz file and at the end it will not work. The other way
would be to include the install script in the tar.gz file, but thats
totally useless, until the install script will do some more than just
extracting the data, since thats already done by the user.
But of course for a CDRom distribution that would be useful and
wouldn't cause much trouble. 

-- 
                                  http://dark.x.dtu.dk/~grumbel/pingus/ | 
Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>             http://home.pages.de/~grumbel/ |
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