Re: what is already there?
James Troup writes:
> > Opposite to RedHat Debian doesn't use proprietery software.
>
> Be fair. a) neither dpkg or rpm are proprietary, they are both free
> software. b) afaik, .rpm files are cpio (a POSIX standard) and can be
> extracted with cpio, and a tiny shell script to get rid of some rpm
> header gunk.
They can? Please tell me how? You need to have rpm2cpio?
Even none of our Redhat experts was able to tell me how to *extract*
files from an rpm archive yesterday when I needed it.
.rpm is proprietary. iirc proprietary means that it's a particular
format (e.g.) from that company instead of a well known standard
(in this case; for sure not a definition which a lawyer could
accept) If I need rpm to *look* inside a .rpm this is proprietary.
And at the moment I don't know any other way instead of installing
rpm on that system.
The Debian way is much better - using standard tools like tar,
gzip and ar - which normally exist on every unix system. Ok,
maybe gzip isn't present on highly commercial systems were
free software isnt' permitted to be installed and ar might not
exist on commercial unices where the owner has forgotton to
buy the development toolkit - but that doesn't count.
Regards
Joey
--
/ Martin Schulze * joey@infodrom.north.de * 26129 Oldenburg /
/ The MS-DOS filesystem is nice for removable media /
/ -- H. Peter Anvin /
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