Re: rpm: can it comply debian policy?
On Sat, May 25, 2002 at 09:46:07AM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > That sounds mostly like a bug in the .rpm packages to me. Avoiding this
> > is exactly why all Debian packages are built with either real root or
> > fakeroot; in fact, I think it's why fakeroot was written in the first
> > place.
>
> Why do you think it is an rpm bug? I don't follow that. The rpm
> works consistently within the rpm system as it was designed to do.
> Therefore it is not a bug in rpm.
(I didn't say it was a bug in rpm, but a bug in the .rpm. I also didn't
say that that was the only bug involved ...)
It may work, that's true. But I think it's completely bizarre for a
package to contain ownership information that isn't intended to be
preserved. If rpm doesn't preserve ownerships at all, then I think that
is a design flaw (principle of least astonishment). If it does preserve
ownerships in the general case and just converts ownerships it doesn't
know about to "root", then I think it's clearly a latent bug in the
package (what happens if you happen to have a user whose username
coincides with the person who built the package? Do all the files end up
owned by that user?).
The technology to avoid this whole can of worms is there in the form of
fakeroot. That's not to say that alien shouldn't try to duplicate the
can of worms where possible, but the packages you're describing aren't
ones to which I'd ever want to put my name.
One query: does the conversion process work if you ensure that all the
usernames embedded in the .rpm exist on your system before starting the
conversion?
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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