I had a question off list on RPM methopdology. Part of that methodology is the concept of openly available bug lists, and freely available pristine source, and patches, and compilation recipies, all wrapped up in an SRPM (more below). This list has some folks coming from mainframe backgrounds (as did I - in a prior life, I wrote tape drivers for '1401's and remember with fondness punching printer control tapes for special form COBOL programs), and some of their ways are new. Here is a three item 'Clip and Save' to acculturate newbies to some RPM tricks. 1. A useful convention in Open Source developemnt is to also file the bug in the Bugzilla at: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ and list the Bugzilla number, as well, so that others can learn from your experience, and add themselves and track and receive notice of a given fix ... 2 ... also posting the version affected is useful -- get it from a given file thus: rpm -qf /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb which returns: bash-2.05$ rpm -qf /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb samba-2.2.1a-4 that is, the 'owning' package is 'samba' at version -2.2.1a-4 3. One thing --- and this one is a bit tricky. Some packages are BUILT from a SRPM -- source RPM -- other than the package name. See, e.g., arpwatch, which is built from tcpdump. This is shown: rpm -q --qf '%{SOURCESRPM}\n' arpwatch bash-2.05$ rpm -q --qf '%{SOURCERPM}\n' arpwatch tcpdump-3.6.2-9.src.rpm You need to know this to figure out the parent SOURCE package, which is the Bugzilla owning 'Component' to file against. -- Russ Herrold On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Post, Mark K wrote: > The "usage" message only lists start|stop|restart|status|condrestart as > options. The "case" statement just above it checks for start, stop, > restart, reload, status and condrestart. In other words "reload" is missing > from the usage message. -- end ================================== .-- -... ---.. ... -.- -.-- Copyright (C) 2001 R P Herrold herrold@owlriver.com NIC: RPH5 (US) My words are not deathless prose, but they are mine. Owl River Company "The World is Open to Linux (tm)" ... Open Source LINUX solutions ... info@owlriver.com Columbus, OH
