On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 02:12:11PM -0500, email@hidden wrote:
...
>Hmm, your binary rpms would have to be recompiled for Darwin. As for
>source rpms, this is probably not the best way to proceed, because
>Darwin is a BSD and not a Linux. For example, the various ports
>systems from the BSD world, such as the one at GNU-Darwin,
>automatically patch sources for BSD. In contrast, RedHat sources are
>likely to be modified for GNU/Linux, and so they are less likely to
>compile for Darwin.
I fully understand all that. I've been compiling/porting opensource
software since about 1985 for a variety of platforms including SCO Xenix,
SCO Unix, Sun, HP-UX, Dynix/PTX, etc. I ported rpm to SCO OpenServer, and
have been building many packages for non-Linux systems using rpms. See:
http://ftp.celestial.com/
The biggest advantage I see to rpms from a developer's standpoint is the
rpm philosophy of building from pristine sources with a formal method of
applying patches and building under the control of the SPEC files. This
makes it a lot easier to systematically build programs, and simply see what
changes were necessary to get something running on a particular platform.
It's also often easier to work around specific installation problems and
wierdness by handling it in the spec file than reworking a bunch of
makefiles that aren't doing what I consider the Right Thing(tm).
There are many advantages from the system administrator's standpoint as
well (understand I'm a longtime CLI guy, and GUIs aren't my natural
environment :-). It's very easy to install packages, verify the integrity
of installed packages, list the contents, etc. using simple rpm commands.
I've found the ``rpm -V'' command invaluable cleaning up cracked Linux
systems, far faster than doing a tripwire check. I've been able to install
updated rpms on a dozen customer machines in about 20 minutes via ssh
logins over the internet. I don't think I could do that as quickly on a
dozen machines sitting on the bench in my office using GUI tools.
>GNU/Linux-ppc binaries are not useful for Darwin either, because to my
>knowledge, no one has built a Linux compatibility library yet.
I much prefer ``rpm --rebuild packagename'', to build binaries that are
compiled for each platform. We have customers running a variety of systems
of varying ages, and I generally manage to build all binaries for a package
for at least six Linux distributions, and SCO OpenServer from a single spec
file.
>Having said all that, RPM is sometimes useful, and there is even an
>RPM-4 based distribution for Darwin out there somewhere. GNU-Darwin has
>an RPM-3 package, and rpm2cpio works great too. If you need RPM-4,
>maybe someone else will explain how to install that.
We're running rpm-3.0.6 based on the latest Caldera Linux SRPMS. SuSE is
also running 3.0.6 rather than 4.x since it seems to cause fewer problems.
>If you are looking for thousands of free software packages for Darwin
>and OS X, check out GNU-Darwin and TDC. I don't think that your
>GNU/Linux rpms will be very useful.
My main usage is for our own packages, and the ability to install all the
software we need on a new customer machine quickly and reliably without a
lot of manual effort.
Bill
--
INTERNET: email@hidden Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
URL: http://www.celestial.com/
``If you make yourselves sheep, the wolves will eat you'' -- Benjamin Franklin
_______________________________________________
unix-porting mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/unix-porting
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
