rpm port from FreeBSD / port behavior question

[Mike Hardy <mhardy@smithsonite.rice.edu>]

Please, no holy wars about whether RPM sucks or not (I'm not sure if you
have them, but I certainly don't want them) - I'm not in love with it or
anything. However, I think its useful to have for peeking at how people
built/packaged certain things when there's no *BSD port.

For that reason, I think it may be useful to other porters, so here it is.

If anyone else has the time/inclination to upgrade rpm from 2.5.6 to 3.x,
be my guest :-)

Here's a general porting question though: If I (as a porter) create
certain directories that will contain very important program data, should
I delete them no matter what on uninstallation, or leave them there
(possibly with a note)?

To be concrete, imagine the RPM package database that gets built in
/var/lib/rpm...If I upgrade RPM, I uninstall the old package, and then
I've lost everything. Doesn't seem like polite behavior to me...

-Mike

rpm.tar.gz