Robert G. Brown wrote: > 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. Perhaps your user data is different than the data I need to distribute, but mine stays mostly the same between revisions--in a 10MB file, maybe 250KB changes. I've been trying to figure out how to do a clean versioned rsync-based packaging scheme, maybe even one that can update the RPM DB with its version info, but it hasn't come to me in a vision yet, nor has my spirit guide shown me the way. I may have to resort to formal design process and other such voodoo. -- Joe Cooper <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Web caching appliances and support. http://www.swelltech.com
