Bill, thanks for the post. I think that the document is definetely a
step in the right direction.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 10:44:20AM -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> - The various BSD-based network services (telnet, finger, talk,
> rsh, ruers, rwall, tftp) have been split into client and
> server packages.
One comment here, unrelated to the documentation: Its always
problematic when packages get split. I normally update our machines by
going to the RPMS dir and saying something like "rpm -Fvh *.rpm". This
won't work when packages have been split. Maybe it would be good to
extend RPM to automatically handle that.
(btw, yes, that happens more often than it should in my opinion. Samba
was a prime example...).
Even more esoteric would be to have support for sub-packages: Instead
of having "samba-common", "samba-manual", "samba-client",
"samba-server", there would be just a "samba" package with support for
partial installation like so:
rpm -i --parts client samba
Which would install the client parts, the matching documentation and
the common stuff thats needed by the client. It would gracefully
handle the freshen part (by just freshening everything that was there
before) and would support partial installation. One could have a
"default" list of sub-packages that gets used on a normal installation
without a --parts specifier.
Ok, now to *really* go overboard, one tanother I would really like to
have is "meta-packaging". Just
rpm -i --parts c,c++,python development
or
rpm -i --parts telnet-client,ftp,icmputils networking
Would give me all I need for C,C++ and python development stuff,
respectively telnet client, ftp client and server, traceroute and
ping. This could be implemented in multiple ways, either have seperate
packages, like it is now and then a meta-package, with just the
information which packages it consists of, or, the second possibility,
have a few large packages with everything included.
[Anyone still with me, please send me a note ;-)]
---Ingo Luetkebohle / 21st Century Digital Boy
Confident, cocky, lazy, dead.
[J. Dread, Otherland]
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