Re: rpm port from FreeBSD / port behavior question

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

On Mon, 6 Dec 1999, Andre Lucas wrote:

> I was going to do a straight port (I did that for HP-UX with GCC, which
> is a total bitch of an anvironment.) Has anyone tried that yet, with any
> version of RPM? I'll probably have a go anyway...

I've been HP-UX, I know the pain...

As for the straight port, I believe the package I sent is pretty straight,
so I'm probably not understanding what you mean...

Its definitely out of date though, and I haven't even attempted rpm-3.x.
It could be easy, or it could be terrible...

> much info... It's a tough balance to reach, I guess. I would like the
> facility to write *important* messages to stdout once installation of
> all packages is complete [or a reason why it's not :-) ] Please
> enlighten me if that's already there, it's not AFAIK.

In porting RPM (my first real port, really) I found that I could do
essentially anything during package installation. Basically, if you can do
it in the shell, you can have the port build/package tools do it for you
and report results to the end-user. I found tons of great examples of this
in other people's ports - most of what you want to do is probably already
done somewhere...

> Exactly. However, RPMs are _supposed_ to be run in 'upgrade' mode, which
> would give the app a chance to (e.g.) upgrade the DB to a new format. If
> you erase the old package you are depriving the upgrade script of a
> chance to do its magic.

I'm not sure if I was completely clear here - I was getting more at the
OpenBSD package tools, as opposed to the RPM tools. Imagine I actually do
the rpm-3.x port. You'd want to delete the old port, and install the new
one (unless there's a better way? I'm a newbie here). If my port deleted
your RPM database in the process, you'd probably be pretty mad at me :-).
I don't know whether I'm violating a standard by not deleting it though ?

Definitely glad someone else is going to use the port though - I hope it
works out for you and saves you time :-)

-Mike