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Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2006 21:38:26 -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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Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
> Ah, the lack of a Windows RPM port was *exactly* the reason
> setup.exe was created.  The simplest way to port RPM was to use
> Cygwin, which then leads to a chicken/egg problem.  
----
    Most linux distributions have solved this issue.  When one goes
to do an install on a fresh system, there is no RPM on the target
machine.  RPM usually doesn't run on the target machine for
various reasons (no libs, no utils, no directory structure, no
filesystem..etc.) :-)

    I think that one normally would use some number of non-RPM tools
to create the infrastructure needed to support RPM first.  Then
install RPM and leverage it to install the rest of the system.

> In all honesty
> though, if you really would like to know the details of the decision-
> making process that made the install process what it is today, you
> can find it all in the cygwin-apps email archives.  You'll have to
> go back quite a ways to find it's beginnings though.
---
    I'm sure, but perhaps more interesting might be emails
talking about when RPM might become an accepted way to distribute
cygwin packages (not that there is anyone to work on it right now,
but if there was).  It's not that RPM is a great work of art or
necessarily even worthy of being a standard, but the point of
cygwin is to provide an environment that makes it easier to
port POSIX compatible (or *ixish) applications.  Using a
widely adopted package standard like RPM would make the cygwin
environment more application-porting friendly.

-l


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