Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/03/28/22:40:15
Peter Ring wrote:
> There's substantial evidence that RPM based distribution of Cygwin is
> feasible:
>
> http://www.holonlinux.com/product/xonwin/index.html
>
> Just in case you don't read Japanese, go directly to the FTP site:
>
> ftp://xow.holonlinux.com/pub/XonWindows/
PETER!
(In case anyone was wondering, Peter was one of those hardy souls
working on porting rpm 'back in the day' -- IIRC Peter was working on
early 4.0.x versions...)
Yes, an RPM-based cygwin is feasible -- but the last time I looked, most
of the competitors said something like: "First do (X) to install a basic
cygwin system, and then use this tarball of rpm.exe, run rpm --initdb,
then use rpm to install and/or update other parts of your system"
Where (X) is "unpack a tarball" or "piggyback off setup.exe and only
install these three packages" or somesuch.
While *feasible,* that's not really *practical* as a "complete"
distribution. Further, none of the schemes out there were capable of
updating the cygwin dll itself -- because rpm.exe uses it. Nor could
they update any other in-use files.
However, things may have changed over the years. I dunno, and I'm too
lazy to check now. :-)
Personally, I'd welcome an official setup-installable package providing
rpm. Here's why:
1) we'd probably see a number of folks -- those who don't want to
permanently maintain a package, but want to provide it for people to use
-- who'd choose to pack their contribution as rpms. (Preferably, these
ad-hoc rpms would go somewhere like /usr/local or /opt/ or ANYWHERE
except /usr and /usr/X11R6/ ).
2) as these numbers grow, folks might begin wondering how to (and
provding code for) help setup.exe and rpm coexist -- updating each
other's databases, maybe even linking setup.exe against librpm, etc etc.
Of course, this requires that someone really really smart figure out
the best way to create a "native" port of librpm -- that can still
figure out where /var/cache/rpm and /etc and suchlike are really located...
On the other hand, that was Robert's idea behind providing the dpkg
stuff in setup-installable form, and the above sequence didn't happen
for deb...
--Chuck
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