On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 03:58:40PM +0200, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote:
> 
> yep, good goal i do agree with.

Excellent!

> but I still don't get why drakfont and urpmi would need to not
> touch /usr (pardon my stupidity if I've still not understood well
> the /usr thingy, I've not experience with nfs mounted /usr),
> since these are "admin" tools they need to be run on the server
> containing /usr as a local disk, so it's correct?

Ahhhh.  Yes.  Of course, on the NFS _server_ these tools should update
/usr (in fact everything on the server works as is now), but it's on
the clients that they should not.  Urpmi and drakfont should
understand that they cannot modify /usr.  Urpmi should simply verify
that the files that are already in /usr (relating to the package being
installed) matches with the RPMs being installed (i.e. md5 checksum)
and give warnings where they don't.  Drakfont should install it's
fonts somewhere else, most likely /var/...

> if we continue your reasoning, there is an inconsistency in rpm
> anyway since the rpm db is in /var/lib/rpm (local to clients)

Right.

> but
> the files installed/removed when this db is changed are in /usr
> (distant from clients)..

Right.  RPM has a quasi-handling of this right now which I am not
entirely happy with.  You can give the option --excludepath /usr to
rpm and it will not install files that would normally go in /usr.  But
it does not do any verification that files that are there are correct.
This also leaves the database void of any file information for files
in /usr, (so rpm -V does not pick up any problems) which I believe is
incorrect, and also, you can't put an equivillent of the --excludepath
option in a config file anywhere, so you have to remember to use it on
every "rpm" commandline.  Urpmi does not even have anything (that I
know of) equivillent to --excludepath.

> maybe i've not understood the whole point, i do agree :). but i'd
> like to understand.

Just keep in mind both the server and the client end of things.  The
server is mostly normal.  The client has issues with /usr being
read-only and not capable of making it read-write.

A good simulation for QA on new packages would be to first use
rpm2cpio to extract the /usr portion of an RPM.  Then remount /usr
read-only and try to install the RPM with the "/usr is read-only
flag set". This will reveal errors that the RPM installation and/or
install scripts have in them.

Once an RPM is installed successfully try to run it.  See if anything
running in it tries to write to /usr (as drakfont does currently).

b.

-- 
Brian J. Murrell

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