Re: (-) Sorry, your distribution type is unsupported.

[Ian Peters <itp helixcode com>]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2000 at 03:47:40PM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> Not that I understand any of this, but I know someone who does:
> 
> On Fri, Sep 29, 2000 at 12:20:29AM -0400 or thereabouts, Ian Peters wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 28, 2000 at 08:05:31PM -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > > There has been communication about the changes from RPM 3 to RPM 4, and
> > > there seems to be pretty decent documentation of the rpmlib API (IANAH, so I
> > 
> > Please, do tell, where is this documentation?
> 
> No quarrel on the lack of docs, but..
> 
> > Is it at www.rpm.org?  Again, that documentation is for RPM 2.5,
> > except for a few code snippets ported to the RPM 3.0.x API.
> 
> Well, isn't the rpm code in CVS there? With rpm-4 as a branch or
> something? Does that help at all? 

The code is there, and we have used it.  Unfortunately, the code is a
mess by this point in time, and the in line documentation in the form
of comments in the headers are often not just inaccurate, but
completely wrong (ie "returns 0 on success" actually means "returns
non-zero on success").  I'm not saying there's no way to find out,
it's just a pain in the ass at times.

> > Wait, that's right, most of the 3.0.x releases managed to be subtly
> > incompatible, so those examples probably won't help you at all.
> > So I guess the next step is to look at the RPM headers.  Except that
> > those actually misdocument RPM in places.  Try again.
> > 
> > Please, I personally know any number of people who would love some
> > accurate and current RPM documentation.
> 
> A message from Alan because he's too lazy to subscribe and post:
> 
>     There is a complete example for multiple versions of rpm (3.0.4,
>     3.0.5 and 4.0.x are all there) in gnorpm-0.95.1 in GNOME CVS.

Thanks.  Like I said, we've muddled through at times, and the help
we've gotten from the very nice Red Hat employees has been
invaluable.  Still, for a library so widely used in the Linux world,
it might be good to think about a real cleanup and doc session some
day.

-- 
Ian Peters
itp helixcode com