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Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 15:48:54 +0100 (CET)
From: Ronald Landheer-Cieslak <ronald AT landheer DOT com>
To: Yann Crausaz <yann_crausaz AT bluemail DOT ch>
cc: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: rpm 4 cygwin
In-Reply-To: <3E804EAB0001C78B@mss4n.bluewin.ch>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0303271536490.29489-100000@localhost.localdomain>
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On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Yann Crausaz wrote:
> I'm afraid I've got to make a point clearer : porting RPM-4.1 to Cygwin
> wasn't thought to install *NIX binaries under MS-Windows ! I will modify
> the source of the ported version of RPM to prevent installing binaries
> that were not built for MS-Windows, so there won't be any confusion
> anymore.
There wasn't any confusion on the purpose of the RPM port to Cygwin. The 
problem brought up was the *existing* confusion on what Cygwin is (a 
UNIX-API providing DLL for Windows applications and not a *NIX emulator 
for Windows that allows you to run *NIX binaries on Windows) and how 
having RPM might be combined with that confusion to lead to the wrong 
conclusion.

The wrong conclusion has been drawn on more than one occasion (one very 
recently) and I was afraid that using RPM as Cygwin's installer (as 
proposed in another mail) would seriously augment the possibility of that 
conclusion being reached.

The modification you propose would make that conclusion less likely - but 
remember to make it a (very, very clear) warning - not an error. It does 
come in handy some times to have binaries of other platforms installed 
(e.g. when cross-compiling)

> The aim of that port isn't really to avoid the use of setup.exe, but
> rather, as I've already said, to allow *NIX users not to be lost under
> Cygwin !
The port, IMHO, is a Good Thing - thank you for doing it.

My fears may well be unfounded (I hope they are) but it gets me
nail-biting anyway (a habit I copied from my wife).

I understood that *you* don't want to replace Cygwin's Setup.exe with the
port but at the time I started biting my nails, that wasn't as clear yet
as it is now.

> Whatsmore, the number of rpm archives for the cygwin platform that are
> available isn't that big : 2 archives... They were just tests to check
> that building/installing/checking/removing archives worked well. In
> fact, I hope that there will be contributions, to increase this number
> ;-) As you can imagine, building an rpm under Cygwin is done quite in
> the same than under Linux (for example).
I wouldn't be surprised at all if that number did grow. Furthermore, souce 
RPMs should work already (and there are many of those) and there *are* 
valid reasons to want to install binary RPMs - though I can't think of any 
where the prefix wouldn't change..

Anyways, I don't have any nails left to bite (unless I take my shoes off) 
so I'll stop worrying ;)

rlc


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