Raul Miller wrote:
>
> On Sun, Sep 26, 1999 at 06:30:35PM -0400, Jim Knoble wrote:
> > Yuck. As H. Peter Anvin mentioned, distributing software packages as
> > tarballs has quite a few limitations.
>
> Almost all of which can be addressed through simple specifications.
>
> > The RPM package format and installation method deals with these
> > limitations nicely.
>
> formats...
> ^
>
> > For example, your note above about file conflicts is a rather
> > primitive way of dealing with conflicts between packages; RPM provides
> > methods of circumventing file conflicts and dealing with special kinds
> > of files (such as configuration files). Tarballs also don't carry any
> > information about what other packages, libraries, etc. their contents
> > depends on.
>
> The various incompatible rpm programs do indeed deal with such things
> for the appropriate .rpm files. But that's not some kind of sacred
> magic which is only associated with the letters rpm.
>
> Trivial example of how to do something analogous using tgz format:
>
> .tgz (or whatever extension) file is built to be unpacked with /opt/
> as current directory and all files have relative path names and
> live inside /opt/<packagename>/. conf files, etc. get unpacked in
> /opt/tmp/<packagename>/ and are dealt after unpacking the tarball.
> The installer would tar tzf the file before unpacking it to make sure
> that it puts all of its files in appropriate places.
>
Why reinvent the wheel? You're starting with something square rather
than something that's at least octagonal.
-hpa
--
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