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From: Charles Wilson <cwilson AT ece DOT gatech DOT edu>
Subject: Re: RPM-4.1 port to cygwin available
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 22:40:03 -0500
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Message-ID: <3E851593.4070805@ece.gatech.edu>
References: <B98E0AC310593E49BE611D63DA0152B804575A AT mimail DOT cph DOT magnus DOT local>
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In-Reply-To: <B98E0AC310593E49BE611D63DA0152B804575A@mimail.cph.magnus.local>

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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