Hi,
Ali Majdzadeh wrote:
Hello John
I have built an RPM package which does some clean-ups and rewrites some
special files. I want this package to get installed as the last RPM
package.
RPM package installation order should ideally be enforced by providing the
right 'Requires' in the rpm spec file. So, in one of my previous jobs we
initially tackled the problem of 'do something after everything is installed'
by just creating a ^meta-package^ which had all the packages to be installed
before it in the 'Requires' tag and the post-installation tasks in it's %post
section. This ensured that it was installed as the last package and the tasks
were run only after all packages were installed.
However as the number of packages grew, the situation got out of hand (to add
to it we started relying, a tad bit too much, on rpm's ordering of %pre,
%post, %preun and %postun). So, we decided to just stop relying on rpm to do
everything.
We simply decoupled the 'tasks to be done post install' and the installation
itself (besides the complexity of maintaining the correct order, we also
required to prompt the user in the some of the post installation scripts). We
did this by ensuring that a 'configuration' script has been run at least once
before the application could be used (much like the vmware-*config.pl scripts
bundled with VMWare products), and this 'configuration' script prompted the
user to install packages that it found missing before continuing with the
post-install instructions.
Contrary to the belief that users appreciate it better if installers try and
do everything (installation and default configuration), so that things
^just-work^, we realized that our users preferred the new way (installation +
configuration script) better.
Just my experience, YMMV.
- steve
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