Hello:
Having as few prerequisites as possible should clearly be one of the top priorities for a tool such as RPM. But we should think carefully about this issue.
To illustrate:
We at Ariel Partners have been serious power users of gnumake since
we started up shop about a year ago. We develop software and web sites
using Java, XML, and related technologies and must produce releases for a
wide variety of customers/projects/applications/platforms/environments simultaneously.
The great thing about gnumake is that you can do nearly anything with it.
However, we noticed two major problems:
1) The rules files, even when meticulously pretty-printed, commented, formatted, etc.
are very difficult for anyone but a "blue adept" to read and understand.
2) gnumake pretty much requires an environment such as cygwin to function properly
on win32 machines
We found that it was much easier:
a) to find people to maintain java subclasses of "Task" (ant) than gnumake rule files
b) to have a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) as a pre-requisite than a posix environment (e.g. cygwin)
To a beginning user of RPM on Solaris/Win32/Linux (we use all three), the prospect
of building RPM for Solaris or Win32 is a bit daunting. To build ant, I only have to install a JRE.
Many Java-based tools actually bundle a JRE so that they are entirely self contained.
Obviously, I am attacking the problem more from a developer's than a system administrator's point
of view. RPM as it is configured today has some basic requirements. You need a kernel
and some libraries and a shell to run it, right? The philosophical question we have to
ask ourselves is how low-level a tool or layer do we consider a JRE and are we comfortable
being totally dependent on one (like ant is....)
Cheers,
--Craeg Strong Ariel Partners LLC
At 02:56 PM 1/23/2001 -0800, you wrote:
On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Perry Hutchison wrote:
> > > RPM is crying out to be rewritten using Java and XML IMHO ;-) > > > > Why on earth would anyone want to do that? > > > > Real Programmers (TM) don't use Java :) > > More to the point, RPM is part of the installation process and > should therefore have as few prerequisites as possible. I'm not > convinced that having to set up a JVM (and, I suppose, a browser) > before installing the OS would be a Good Thing. >
I do agree with that though I don't see why you would need a browser.
josh
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