On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Lars Damerow wrote: > >From seth vidal <skvidal@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 10:33:59AM -0400: > > On Thu, 2003-08-07 at 20:28, Robert G. Brown wrote: > > > On 7 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. > > > > -sv > > I can vouch for Seth on this one. We tried a scheme with multiple RPM databases > as well, and it got out of hand almost immediately, forcing us to redesign. > Relocation is also next to impossible; it works for so few types of packages > that I'm surprised that it was included in RPM at all. Any package that > contains a shared library is really hard to be relocatable and still play nice > with the rest of the system. Yeah, but remember the proposed application space -- ONLY for packages that installed "data" or "noarch" things with no intrinsic architecture dependence. So shared libraries and "relocatability" in the sense that relative or absolute paths are preserved is mostly irrelevant. Not trying to build binary thingies that will install in /usr, /usr/local, /usr/share, /opt, or $HOME equally with rpm --relocate /usr=/opt, which I have no doubt is very difficult indeed. Think slackware packages -- glorified tarballs with an internal installation script would be adequate. However, slackware packages aren't terribly satisfactory because of their relatively weak versioning and obsoleting and dependencies. It would indeed be lovely to require jpilot and/or pilot-xfer for a package installing pilot db's and software. It would be nice to require xmms or some other ogg player as a dependency of an ogg-based music package. Or think e-books, with an associated e-book reader (or one of several, all open source). Or drug databases. There are all sorts of markets for packaged DATA, but most of it doesn't need to be and in fact shouldn't be installed as root. At the moment linux seems to lack an idiot-proof (simple) mechanism for versioned, dependencied, checksummed distribution of pure (possibly volatile) data to users. rpm's have the intrinsic features but rpm itself does not. yum (even from the command line) is simple enough to qualify as an idiot proof and automagical front end for rpm, and if/when a nice GUI wrapper is written for yum (perhaps capable even of fronting a user's cron, at least wrt scheduling yum updates) then yum+rpm+web could become the net's next killer app, at least for people buying data. 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
