On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 23:15:02 +0100 Holly Bostick wrote: > In any case, the relatively few RPMs in the Portage tree are generally > there (afaik), because we don't get a choice about it-- the binaries > provided (usually by some proprietary source) are only packaged *as* > RPMs, so if we want or need them, that's what we have to use. Certainly > that is the case for the ATI drivers, and likely for the RealPlayer > package as well.
Thats right, and there are two ways of getting an rpm onto a gentoo system. For example I installed main actor from an rpm because thats how it is packaged. There is no ebuild for it. I emerged rpm then looked at the mainactor rpm [1] file to see what dependencies it had, and where it wanted to install files. I manually emerged the dependencies and then installed main actor by typing: rpm --nodeps mainactor-5.5.7-suse_9.3.i686.rpm and it installed. What I was too lazy to do, but would have been better, was write an ebuild that installs the rpm. That would have the advantages of 1. being automated (after writing the ebuild) 2. making it easy to update or remove mainactor 3. fitting in better with the system package manager as a whole. [1] The easiest way i have found to look inside an rpm is to use midnight commander (mc) and hit <enter> with the rpm highlighted. You get a "virtual" look inside the rpm, including all the metadata, the install scripts, and the files to be installed. The rpm package must be present on your system. mc can be used in this way to look inside zipped files, tar files, bzipped files etc etc. -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- [email protected] mailing list
