Re: Some things GNOME really needs

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

I don't know how useful it would be to add support for tarballs to gnorpm.
I didn't think it was the sort of tool you would want for that (the main
reason for compiling from source is so you have more control).

As for relocatable packages, I don't have any support for this in gnorpm
at the moment.  What sort of interface to this would be useful.  Just as a
note, relocatable packages have existed since the rpm 2.4.x series (I
think -- note how ever that they didn't work very well back then).  Also,
just because rpm lets you relocate a package that was not built as a
relocatable package, doesn't mean you should.  The usual reason why a
package is not relocatable is because there are compiled in paths.

James.

--
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/


On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, Adrian Hosey wrote:

> 
>: > 1. INSTALL WIZARD
>: > I know alot of you think that rpm are great but for most the people that
>: > use windows rpm -ivh --force --nodeps *.rpm, or whatever would scare the
>: > hell out of them. Great you say, just use GnoRPM or a tool like that.
>: > Two problems:
>: > A. What about programs you have to compile, or aren't RPMs
>: 
>: Well, I wouldn't be pointing newbies at non-RPM packages. OK, I agree,
>: some kind of automated installation program to type
>: "./configure;make;make install" would make installation much easier for
>: many people, but the reason it's not automated is because so many things
>: can go wrong, and a program just can't account for that kind of thing.
> 
> Agreed that having a wizard build something from source is a tall
> order. That shouldn't stop someone from taking a crack at it if they
> want to.
> 
> I dig Gnorpm, I think it's great. But I think there's some merit to a
> "unified" installation program that give you the same interface
> whether you're on Redhat or Debian dealing with rpms or debs
> respectively. This program could also transparently try running alien
> if you try to install a deb on a Redhat machine or vice versa. Perhaps
> if James is interested Gnorpm could grow into this tool.
> 
> Does Gnorpm prompt for install prefixes on relocatable packages?
> Relocatable packages are rare enough that I haven't had a chance to
> find out, but apparently with rpm 3.0 the package doesn't even have to
> be built relocatable anymore, so this could be a good feature.
> 
>    - A
>