Re: RPM for gnome-libs 1.0.54?

[Raul Acevedo <raul cantara com>]

Elliot Lee wrote:

 > > Unfortunately, RedHat decided long ago that RPMs would put things in
 > > places different than a standard tarball install would.  So, doing the
 > > above simply does not work if you have installed things from RPM.  It
 > > is a royal pain, a very bad decision, and one of the main problems
 > > with RPM.  But that's the way it is.
 > 
 > That has nothing to do with RPM, it's just a decision of the packager, 

If everyone decides that "the way to do things in RPM" is to put files in
certain locations, then by culture it becomes an RPM issue.

 > and the locations are perfectly normal and FSSTD compliant. 

The locations in isolation are fine, and it's actually a good thing that
they are FSSTD compliant, if that's the case.  The problem comes in when
you need to mix tarballs with RPMs, because things get put in different
places, and it can be hard to know exactly how to tell configure to put
things in the same places an RPM would.  This doesn't even address the
issue of dependencies, but that's a separate discussion that breeds the
*other* discussion as to the wisdom of mixing tarball and RPM installs.
Perhaps that's what this is really all about.

 > No it's not going to be semi-obvious, but neither is 'tar -xzf
 > foo.tar.gz' obvious from a once-over of the tar man page. 

There's a very big difference.  If I have a tar file, it is very obvious
that there is a command called tar, whose man page I can look up, and
figure out how to make it do what I want.  It might be difficult to follow,
but I know where to look, because I know there's something to look for.

Converting tarballs to RPMs is a different beast, because it never even
occurs to me that rpm could have such capability, so it never occurs to me
to look at the rpm man page in the first place, because I don't even know
such capability exists in the first place.

 > You know how to do it because of experience. That's why things like info
 > pages and extended documentation (ala www.rpm.org) are important.

Exactly!  That's why pointers saying "hey, did you know you can convert
GNOME tarballs to RPMs really easily" are critical in places like the GNOME
web site, preferably someplace where people will easily see it.

 > On the contrary - people concentrate on what they see as important. 

You're missing my point; like I said in my earlier post, programmers don't
have to be the ones that do it.  Clearly this affects a lot of people, so
GNOME at the admin level should be addressing this.  I don't think this
isn't getting done because there's a lack of people to do it; I don't think
it happens because no one has realized it should happen.

 > If you're willing to volunteer your time to help out on this issue,
 > which does indeed affect a lot of GNOME users, then speak up and we'll
 > put you to work. :)

Right now mostly I'm trying to contribute by filing bug reports, though as
of October GNOME that job has been pretty boring.  (This is a very good
thing.:)

In this issue, the most I can volunteer is the following suggestion, which
is I think all that is needed: when GNOME puts out tarballs, make a brief
mention to the ability to convert them to RPM, for those that use RPM, with
the rpm command.  Then you can either say "rpm -ta", or point them to the
man page.  That's all it takes.

Raul