Re: .rpm? .lsb??
On Sun, Sep 26, 1999 at 06:30:35PM -0400, Jim Knoble wrote:
> Yuck. As H. Peter Anvin mentioned, distributing software packages as
> tarballs has quite a few limitations.
Almost all of which can be addressed through simple specifications.
> The RPM package format and installation method deals with these
> limitations nicely.
formats...
^
> For example, your note above about file conflicts is a rather
> primitive way of dealing with conflicts between packages; RPM provides
> methods of circumventing file conflicts and dealing with special kinds
> of files (such as configuration files). Tarballs also don't carry any
> information about what other packages, libraries, etc. their contents
> depends on.
The various incompatible rpm programs do indeed deal with such things
for the appropriate .rpm files. But that's not some kind of sacred
magic which is only associated with the letters rpm.
Trivial example of how to do something analogous using tgz format:
.tgz (or whatever extension) file is built to be unpacked with /opt/
as current directory and all files have relative path names and
live inside /opt/<packagename>/. conf files, etc. get unpacked in
/opt/tmp/<packagename>/ and are dealt after unpacking the tarball.
The installer would tar tzf the file before unpacking it to make sure
that it puts all of its files in appropriate places.
--
Raul
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