On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Rob Thorne wrote: > Matthew Saltzman wrote: > > >On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Rob Thorne wrote: > > > OTOH, if you had the > >wireless-tools RPM in place before the upgrade, it probably would have > >been upgraded and we'd all be none the wiser. > > > True. But many people need to rebuild the pcmcia-cs package manually, > and frequently need to update wireless tools as well. When you do so, > they install into /usr/local by default. One of the things about RPM-based systems is that the sysadmin needs to work within the framework to use them to best effect (especially with system resources). You could grab the SRPM, install it, replace the tarball with the new one, make some (usually minor) adjustments to the spec file, and rebuild the RPM. Then when you install it, things end up where they are expected and the appropriate dependencies are fulfilled in the RPM database. Yes, it's a bit more work, but then you get the advantages of RPM. If that's not to your liking (that's a generic "you"), then maybe Slackware or LFS is a better distribution for you. > >>2) The location of iwconfig is *hardwired*. Not so good. > > > >Not so bad. If the dependency is satisfied, then iwconfig is guaranteed > >to be in the right place. This is how RPM systems ought to work, I think. > > > It's a little tricky to do this with RPM, since it isn't clear which > package should not install if wireless-tools isn't present. Arguably, > "neat", the network config tool, should check for iwconfig, and give > some feedback to indicate that wireless is not supported, and why. Good point. Running a network should not require having wireless tools unless you are using wireless. But if you do have wireless, then how do you know to make sure the tools are installed? Some of this sort of thing is eventually the responsibility of the user. > >>My system had a version of iwconfig in /usr/local/bin. Once I made a > >>symlink to /usr/local/bin/iwconfig at /sbin/iwconfig, the wireless card > >>comes up automagically, as it should. > >> > >> > > > >How did iwconfig get into /usr/local/bin? If you had the wireless-tools > >RPM it should be in the right place. > > > > > Again, if you build from source (and many people have to), it will be in > /usr/local unless you specially tweak the location with "configure". > > Adding a check for iwconfig under /usr/local would be pretty easy to do, > and would cover this case. But how many exceptions would need to be made for the possibility that someone, somewhere (or even several people) might prefer to install a package from source? Apache? Sendmail? Ghostscript? Glibc? Perl? Gnome? See above re. playing nice with RPM. Building from source or installing without RPM is OK for end-user packages, but for system resources, it's important to understand and deal with the integration issues. You already discovered the next-best solution: symlinks. -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs@clemson.edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
