Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin@cygwin.com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin@cygwin.com X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: cygwin@cygwin.com From: Charles Wilson Subject: Re: RPM-4.1 port to cygwin available Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 22:40:03 -0500 Lines: 53 Message-ID: <3E851593.4070805@ece.gatech.edu> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: 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 -- 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/