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Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:30:04 -0700
From: Linda Walsh <cygwin AT tlinx DOT org>
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Subject: Re: RPM's require to much knowledge of setup to port easily
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Christopher Faylor wrote:
> There is no one-to-one equivalent to "rpm -qi" but "rpm -qf" is equivalent
> to "cygcheck -f" and "cygcheck -c <packagename>" will give you the package
>   
---
    That's part of the problem.  There may or may not be a
1:1 equivalent for whatever option I'm used to with rpm.  I don't
use those administrative options often, but I use them more often
on linux than cygwin.  I end up forgetting if something is a
supported option or not -- I may go and look for the command, only
to find it's one of the unsupported options.  I've already wasted
too much time at that point, and lost my train of thought.

    I remember reading about a study somewhere regarding attention
and productivity.  In the average office environment, people got
interrupted every 10-15 minutes.  However, it took the average
person 25 minutes to get refocused on the task they were doing.

    Heck, how many times do I go from the living room to my bedroom
to get something, then do something completely different, only to
come back out to the living room and realize I'd forgotten to do
what I went back for?  Distractions are the bane of productivity.
Figuring out and remembering yet another way to do things just
for cygwin is just another "minor" distraction.

>
> It's not clear that you really understand that 1) cygwin "packages" are
> just tar files and 2) there is already a way to do some of the things
> that you have mentioned.
>   
----
    Yes, and?
> I wouldn't mind moving to a more accepted packaging format but I don't
> think that doing so would make people more inclined to contribute
> packages.  A setup.hint file is much simpler than an rpm spec file so,
> unless you actually already understand rpm spec files, moving to rpm
> could actually add an additional burden to package submission.
>   
----
    For people with an existing .rpm file, work to create
.rpm file = near zero.  Anything above zero is an infinite
percent more work  ((large or small)/zero).  If one has a
a package, that has no rpm, just a tarball, then yes, a setup
file may be easier, but the vast majority of tools ported here,
I can find near equivalences for under some distro (SuSE, RH,
Mandriva). 
>> I still don't get all the reasons behind forcing everyone into a
>> new format.  Is it just a power trip or what?
>>     
>
> Actually, the "new" (i.e., five+ year old) format was imposed on us by
> the Trilateral Commission.  
---
Ah, but you avoided answering the question.  Why did the cygwin
project go with another package format?  It can't be because
rpm doesn't run natively under Win -- since when installing
system for the first time, a non-rpm setup & install process
is used.  "Rpm" is used after the basic packages are loaded.

Something else I can't do in setup -- I can't do a the equivalent
of a "rpm -qpi" or "rpm -ql" to see the information about the package
or what files it's going to install from the command line.  The 1
phrase description in setup leaves more than a bit to be desired.

-l


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