Re: Call For Articles

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>]

Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com> writes:

> Ingo Ruhnke wrote:
 
>> 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.
 
> It's an idea, but I don't know... I guess reloading the whole RPM is the
> only thing we can do with RPMs.

Yes, that will cause the smallest throuble and reloading it is probably
easier than downloading an patch which will fail to work.
 
> One thing I could do maybe would be make a .src.rpm that would (as part
> of the "build" script) get the original files, copy them to a temporary
> place (like the RPM build root) and patch them there, thus creating the
> newer RPM package from the currently installed package. I think there is
> a single command that can compile a source RPM into a binary RPM and
> install it, yes?

Sounds like a good idea, so the user wouldn't had to keep his old rpm.

> Netscape puts each module in a tar file (not compressed, that would be
> useless), and put the install script along with the modules into a
> tar.gz file. The script would find the right place to install and create
> directories appropriately. For example, while the default prefix could
> be /usr/local, the user could specify a different one, and if it
> includes the name of the package (or have an option), it would "flatten"
> the distribution in a single directory.

Yep, a install script for tar.gz files could be usefull, but I think
it would only be usefull for larger packages, where you have some
options when installing (for example CD games, where you can choose
which data should be installed), on a simple 2MB tar.gz there is maybe
nothing  which is worth the efford to customize the package with an
install script. 
 
> I also intend on including an RPM spec file in the tar.gz so that a user
> could convert it easily to an RPM by himself.

Aren't SourceRPM's meant for that reason?! But never the less if you
include the RPM spec file it won't hurt anybody. If you wrap that
throu a install script it could be very handy. If the user is able to
choose if he wants to build and rpm and install that or if he wan't to
install the thing under /usr/local, without the help of rpm.

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