On 8 Aug 2003, seth vidal wrote: > > > 1. --relocate is broken. > > > 2. most pkgs will break for it even if they were built right > > > 3. this is crackrock. > > > > 4. sigh. > > Keep in mind - juggling dependencies for a single system and single > database is hard enough. Doing it for 2 gets dramatically harder and > relocatable binaries are difficult to make on their best day. I'm fairly certain that one can build an rpm that installs a tarball or file collection into e.g. /tmp that uses a %post to do any actual installation into a local/home directory and then cleans up. One can then run rpm -Uvh --nodeps --dbpath ~/rpm whatever.noarch.rpm and have it do the right thing, sort of, without needing write permissions to /var/lib/rpm. So it probably CAN be done now, sort of, without having to mess with relocatability directly although of course one really wants a a modified dependency checking, just for rpm to check /var/lib/rpm for installed dependencies (only) followed by dependency and obsoletes from e.g. --localdbpath ~/rpm, and WRITE installation results for the package only into --localdbpath. Sort of the way yum now permits hierarchical repositories, rpm needs to support hierarchical databases and a purely userspace or local mode. Alas, rpm appears to be well-designed for root use but fairly unsupportive of userspace use. I suppose yum inherits this, since one would (at least) have to create a whole mode that invoked rpm only with the --nodeps --dbpath option, and then of course one can't check for e.g. jpilot dependencies in rootspace if one wishes to install (as per example) pilot programs and data. With luck obsoletes would still work though, which is one of the primary motivations. This is really a bit of a shame, because yum is fabulous at the versioning, retrieval and updating that running a commercial (or for that matter free) manual/automated data distribution and update facility for users who might not have root. rpm's also have all the internal components one needs to support it (which is really just an archive, header and %post script). Hacking this into rpm (a necessary predecessor of putting a userspace mode into yum) probably is crackrock indeed -- it's not like rpm isn't already fabulously complex and often broken already. Still, the commercial possibilities of this are very tempting indeed... rgb -- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@xxxxxxxxxxxx
