On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 19:55, Brent Fox wrote: > On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 12:28, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > On 4 Jun 2003, Brent Fox wrote: > > > > > On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 11:29, guest wrote: > > > > The book looks great and I have no problem paying for a well written > > > > tomb that organizes everything in one place. However it seems to me the > > > > raw information should be available some place in the distribution even > > > > if its a cryptic man page. My look shows them to be out of date or > > > > incomplete. Thats understandable for some of the 1000's of packages in > > > > the distribution with harried upstream maintainers that sometimes fall > > > > back on "read the source." But for the Package Manager itself, a RH > > > > creation and now part of the LSB, we shouldn't have to go Amazon for > > > > essentials. > > > > > > You're totally right. I'll forward a copy of this email over to the > > > Docs group and see if they can do anything to help. > > > > from my experience, i think there should be at least a couple levels > > of RPM documentation. > > > > first, there's just plain "rpm" usage, for > > installing/upgrading/freshening/removing/querying. > > > > a *slightly* more sophisticated second level would be installing > > and building source RPMs, although this is almost indistinguishable > > from the first level, perhaps adding in additional info for building > > for a specific architecture. > > > > finally, there's docs to build your own RPMs. > > > > at a minimum, the first (and second) levels should be *very* well > > documented and come with the RH distros. > > > I think the first level already exists at: > http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/custom-guide/ch-rpm.html That mostly covers the basic needs for just using rpm, though some "power query" examples wouldn't hurt - my main gripe (which is really an issue of rpm itself but since it is as is...) is that something like "rpm -q --whatrequires openssl" doesn't give you the slightest clue what packages *really* require openssl, to get that information you need to do something like "rpm -q --whatrequires `rpm -q --provides openssl`" > > To me, the second and third levels are basically the same thing. The > only difference is that in the second level you already have a spec file > to work from and in the third you have to create a spec file. I think > that they could be collapsed into one section. > > Basically, divide it the way that RPM itself is now divided...rpm and > rpmbuild. That's what makes sense to me anyway. More or less yes, but doing a simple "rpmbuild --rebuild foo.src.rpm" in my mind falls under *using* rpm than developing or packaging for it. Packaging *good* rpm's is more or less an art of it's own and would deserve a whole book of it's own. For such material I think it's very much ok to tell people to "buy the book", RH doesn't come with a printed gcc manual either. - Panu -
