Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/03/27/23:05:50
Robert Collins wrote:
> I find this concern mystifiying though, we've had an rpm port from Chuck
> for what - 3 ? 4 ? years.
And mine wasn't the first.
Robert is correct that we've had very few (zero?) reports of "oops I
installed a Red Hat Linux rpm and it scrogged my cygwin". We have,
however, had a continuing stream of re-re-re-ports of rpm itself (back
in the rpm-3.x days) and a dime-a-dozen "better cygwin installation
schemes" based around the author's personal re-port of rpm. In each
case, they created a short-lived ruckus on this mailing list, and
eventually the forked rpm-based cygwin distro died from neglect. [The
only proposal along these lines that ever made any sense to me was Dario
Alcocer's idea from ~16 months ago, but unfortunately little came of that.]
However, nobody (until now) has ported rpm-4.x to cygwin (AFIAK) -- so
that's new. As rpm-4 is a near total rewrite of rpm IIRC, I'm sure it
was a major effort. (which is why, among other reasons, I never bothered
to update my port) Besides, rpm-4 requires db-4, and I wasn't going to
support YA library package. Recently, however, Nicholas Wourms ported
and begain maintaining db-2 and db-3 packages, and has db-4 packages
"ready to go" -- which makes an rpm-4 port feasible. However, AFAIK the
author of this new rpm-4 port built his own version of db-4 and linked
to it (statically?). This is not horrible -- it follows Red Hat Linux's
own practice: their primary installation tool should NOT have avoidable
dynamic external dependencies. That's why the rpm-4 source tarball
contains internal copies of both db and popt.
However, we're not Red Hat Linux. Personally, I'd prefer that (a)
Nicholas release his db-4 package <g>, and (b) the rpm package
eventually accepted into the cygwin distribution be dynamically linked
against cygdb-4.1.dll and cygpopt-0.dll.
But, them as writes the code, gets to choose. So this ^^^ is just a
bunch of babbling. <g>
--Chuck
--
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
- Raw text -