RE: RPM for gnome-libs 1.0.54?

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc cu-portland edu>]

Well, I'm going to post a couple of non-gnome related things here, just
ignore this if you're not interested.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Zach Frey [mailto:zfrey@bright.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 1999 1:10 PM
> To: Raul Acevedo
> Subject: Re: RPM for gnome-libs 1.0.54?
> 
> 
> On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 03:37:03PM -0500, Raul Acevedo wrote:
> > Zach Frey wrote:
> >  >     rpm -ta <tarball>.tar.gz
> >  > 
> >  > This should generate the source RPM, plus all binary RPMs.
> > 
> > If this is all it takes to generate binary RPMs, then why:
> > 
> > 1.  Does GNOME not *always* provide RPMs for every tarball 
> release, given
> >     that it's so simple?
>  
> Miguel et al. would have the "official" answer, but --
> 
>    a.  Tarballs are OS-agnostic, RPM is only for RPM-based Linux
>        distributions (and those hardy souls who use RPM on 
> other systems).

Are they using different versions of the rpm tool, or is there something
else that breaks these?  I haven't been able to make debian install yet, so
I can't evaluate debs as a format, but I like RPM so far.  If there was a
way to make RPMs portable, that might allow more people to use RPMs more
easily.

> 
>    b.  RPMs don't work across distributions, thus the proliferation of
>        Red Hat X.Y RPMs, SuSE RPMs, etc.
> 
>    c.  Miguel has mentioned before (once upon a time when I 
> was complaining
>        about out of date .spec files) that the GNOME hackers 
> see themselves
>        as trying to create good, solid code, and let other 
> folks worry about
>        the details of RPM, Debian, etc. packaging for the 
> specific platforms.

Well, I'm going to keep my mouth shut because I'm not a coder (yet), but
when I get there, I'll start commenting.

> 
> > 2.  Isn't this information on generating RPMs from the tarball given
> >     someplace really obvious and easy to find? 
>  
>    It's there, under 'man rpm'.  But the man page (at least 
> for RPM 2.5)
>    was ... more opaque than it should have been, and I actually had to
>    ask this question myself once upon a time.

Hmm, is that what ships with RedHat 6, or 6.1, or with some version of SuSE?
Or are they all the same versions, and all have crappy man pages?  Sorry for
these not having anything at all to do with GNOME, but they're things that
concern me about the future of free software, and I try to take every
opportunity to improve the free software community.
	Greg