That frood Benjamin Scott sassed:
> On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, Paul Lussier wrote:
> > Why would I want to NFS mount my /usr partition?
>
> A cluster full of diskless workstations comes to mind...
Which is great if that's what you have, but no one buys diskless
workstations anymore. The cost savings just isn't there. It also
makes a mess out of your network, virtually guaranteeing that you'll
need a 100Mb network and even then it will suck if it's large enough.
Imagine, EVERY binary, EVERY library, EVERY font, EVERY file of EVERY
kind being served to EVERY desktop via NFS. Ick. Disk space
(especially IDE, which is what everyone is shipping these days) is
damn cheap. No need for all that hastle.
> > If it were truly designed for centralized installation, then --prefix and
> > --relocate would work on *every* pacakge. It doesn't, because RPM wasn't
> > designed with the concept of an NFS server in mind.
>
> The reason --prefix and --relocate don't work on every package is that most
> packages have compiled-in defaults for the locations of their files. If you
> move the locations of those files, the programs stop working. This isn't RPM,
> it's 99% of the software packages out there. Open Source packages assume
> you'll recompile if you want to change a path (that's efficient!). Closed
> Source packages are just stupid.
I agree with this, but you asked (indirectly perhaps, but I believe it
was directly) what the weaknesses of the package management systems
are. Regardless of WHY it's a weakness, this is still a weakness.
> Blaming RPM for this is an error.
But what is RedHat doing to improve this situation? Is their code
relocatable? Hmm... I don't think so. You'd think they'd encourage
development of packages that make use of all their neato-keen
features, but they don't even use them themselves!
> > Yes, but how do I accomplish this if my NAS is exporting the path /nfs to
> > the world and I want to install all "centrally admin'ed pkgs" down that
> > path rather than /usr?
>
> "rpm --root /nfs --dbpath /rpmdb/ --install package.rpm"
After which that same "99% of the software packages out there" will
not work, regardless of why. This doesn't help me at all (which was
Paul's point).
--
We sometimes catch a window, a glimpse of what's beyond
Was it just imagination stringing us along?
---------------------------------------------------
Derek Martin | Unix/Linux geek
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Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu
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