On Feb 26, 2007, at 20:46, Nigel Stewart wrote:
If all of this sounds deluded, I am relying on you all here
to point out the show-stopping flaw... :-)
I think it's a good idea.
As a transition mechanism you might think about writing an RPM or deb
filesystem. Taking the RPM instance:
mount -t rpmfs /var/lib/rpm /rpm
ls /rpm/htop
current@ 0.6.4-2.fc6/ 0.6.5-1.fc6/
ls -l /rpm/htop/current
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Feb 27 2007 current ->
0.6.5-1.fc6
ls -R /rpm/htop/0.6.5-1.fc6/
/rpm/htop/0.6.5-1.fc6/usr/bin/:
htop
/rpm/htop/0.6.5-1.fc6/usr/share/applications:
htop.desktop
/rpm/htop/0.6.5-1.fc6/usr/share/doc/htop-0.6.5:
AUTHORS COPYING ChangeLog INSTALL NEWS README
/rpm/htop/0.6.5-1.fc6/usr/share/man/man1:
htop.1.gz
/rpm/htop/0.6.5-1.fc6/usr/share/pixmaps:
htop.png
and you could then populate the 'traditional' filesystem with
symlinks. It's not ideal, but it's a start. I stole that part from
the Fedora /etc/alternatives mechanism.
Now, if an RPM was just a cpio archive you'd be done. But you have
pre- and post-install scripts that get run, mechanisms for helping
with /etc/ configuration, etc.
How do you get away from /etc? To be thorough you'd need read/write
parts of the RPM and checksummers that know how to ignore those.
Might as well include versioning of those read/write parts since
you're starting from scratch.
Also, cpio isn't a random-access format like ZIP, so you have to
redefine RPM. I'd probably re-use the .jar format - I think it has
everything you're likely to need.
Cool idea, keep at it!
-Bill
-----
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