On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 03:46:24PM +0100, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote: >On Thu, Jan 09, 2003, Bill Campbell wrote: > >> Would it be reasonable to default to gzip/gunzip instead of >> compress/uncompress for the bootstap procedures? Ten years ago >> compress was ubiquitous and gzip rare, but today I think that's >> changing, probably because of patent issues on compress. >> [...] > >Hmmm... the general problem is that a compressed file both uncompress >and gzip can decompress. This way our openpkg*src.sh can be uncompressed >really on every platform because we already try "gunzip", "gzip -d" and >"uncompress" for decompression. This is important because the bootstrap >should require as less special things as possible. > >But if we would gzip the source in openpkg*src.sh, this would _require_ >gunzip or "gzip -d" on the target platform. And there are still more >Unix platforms without "gunzip" but with still "uncompress". Linux is >AFAIK the only strange platform which does no longer provide uncompress >(one have to install the "ncompress" package for this). So I'm not very >happy to make life harder on the remaining platforms just because Linux >is such strange. OTOH we cannot do any Linux specials here, because >the openpkg*src.sh is platform independent. Hmmm...
I understand the issues, having dealt with much the same thing at least 10 years ago when compress/uncompress were ubiquitous and gzip was the new kid on the block (I still have compressed binaries of gzip for SCO Xenix on ftp.celestial.com for people who wanted access to the open source software that we gzip'ed). There was quite a bit of discussion and concert about that time about the copyright/patent issues with compress. >So, IMHO if we really switch to gzip'ed sources we usually will have >to also add (separately) a gzip.tar which we can unpack and build >on-the-fly in case the platform lacks "gzip". That's certainly how I've handled this sort of thing. We've done something similar for the software we've had for SCO OpenServer on our ftp site that I've been building with RPM. We have a bundle that basically bootstraps RPM on OSR5 (not nearly as sophisticated as openpkg though which is largely why I'm here :-). I suspect though that by the time admins discover openpkg they've already got a working version of gzip on their systems. >> [...] >> Now if I can figure out how to build the bootstrap src.sh file, I >> can test this thing :-). > >"./openpkg.boot -s" is your friend here. Thanks. I'm still climbing the learning curve of openpkg. Bill -- INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 URL: http://www.celestial.com/ ``People from East Germany have found the West so confusing. It's so much easier when you have only one party.'' -- Linus Torvalde, Linux Expo Canada when asked about confusion over many Linux distributions. ______________________________________________________________________ The OpenPKG Project www.openpkg.org User Communication List [EMAIL PROTECTED]
