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Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 14:04:11 -0400 (EDT)
From: Igor Peshansky <pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu>
Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
To: Linda Walsh <cygwin AT tlinx DOT org>
cc: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: RPM's (was Re: unix 'at' command implementation)
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On Sat, 10 Jun 2006, Linda Walsh wrote:

> Eric Blake wrote:
> > > I have cygwin install but I can not find the
> > > implementation of Unix 'at' command.
> > >
> > Because no one has ported an open source version of it
> > to cygwin yet.
> >
> ----
>    Some packages might be more easily ported if RPM's
> became a common way to package cygwin packages.  Much
> of the porting effort is in converting to the cygwin installer.
> Someone asked about logrotation a while back and I was
> surprised no one had ported a logrotate package.  I pulled
> the source RPM from my SuSE distro, and was able to
> produce a binary RPM in about 10 minutes, then I realized
> RPM's weren't a desirable format for cygwin packages.

Do you mean that you used Cygwin's rpm package to produce that RPM?

>    I'm sure there's some good reason for converting all
> packages to yet another installer, but I'm not sure I know
> what they are.  One side effect, though -- it can  put a
> damper on porting programs over when most (or all) of the
> work is in converting to the a different installer.

Technically, nothing prevents you from shipping a Cygwin package (which is
just a .tar.bz2) that contains only the Cygwin binary RPM and the
postinstall script that invokes "rpm" to unpack that binary RPM (as long
as that package also "requires:" the "rpm" package).  You'll also need to
build a manifest of all extracted files and have a preremove script that
cleans those up.  See the gcc-mingw-core package for an example of a
similar approach.

What you will lose with the above is the ability to list and search
package contents via cygcheck and the online package search.
Incidentally, one of the things we should teach setup and cygcheck to do
is look at the manifest files produced by postinstall scripts and include
those in the file lists of the package.  I'm sure it would be easier to do
than add full dpkg or rpm support to setup.exe, and would be a good way
to familiarize yourself with the code of setup/cygcheck.  As usual, PTC.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_	    pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu | igor AT watson DOT ibm DOT com
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!)
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		old name: Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"Las! je suis sot... -Mais non, tu ne l'es pas, puisque tu t'en rends compte."
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