On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Kristin Wright wrote: > > I'll file this away... (as opposed to tossing). > > At the very least, we can document this in the installation instructions. > Right now, they say 'download and install the JDK' as the first step so we > assume a JDK exists. I believe that someone else encountered this problem > and ended up reinstalling redhat because they didn't realize what the > problem was.
OK. Here are a few comments. It does end in a constructive remark, so please bear with me :-) I consider it a flaw that tinyos _requires_ a JDK installed. I have been developing for TinyOS and porting a number of files to a new platform without using _any_ java programs at all. This is not really important though. I would always assume that an RPM contains enough information about its dependencies to "work", if its just installed (rpm -Uvh or similar). SUNs RPM's seems to correctly "provide jre", whereas IBMs are more flaky: "provides IBMJava2-SDK = 1.4.1-0.0". Even if this information can not be used, it could be used from the "preinstall" script to check for an JDK. I personally consider it absolutely unacceptable to have an RPM that a) Installs a large number of files, but is unable to complete its installation if a program is missing. Unable as in: "rpm have to be killed, since the postinstall program is looping forever". b) Leaves the system in a state that is very hard to distinguesh from "totally broken". (I too, reinstalled the system before realising that it was the tinyos package that broke the system _and_ /made logins as root impossible/.). My suggestion is this: Please consider 0) changing the locate-jre program to check for already running instances of locate-jre. If more than, say, 10 instances is already running, I belive it should be safe to assume that something is wrong. You may even, (I do not know enough shell magic for this), check if the locate-jre processes are part of the same process group, and make conclusions based on this. 1) Running the JRE check in the preinstall script, aborting installation if no JDK/JRE is found. Thanks, Mads -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Mads Bondo Dydensborg. http://www.distlab.dk/madsdyd/ | | +45 35 32 14 18 | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ _______________________________________________ Tinyos-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.Millennium.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/tinyos-users
