Brian Forte wrote:
At risk of igniting an argument I believe it's worth noting there
are two active RPM projects.
There are probably better places to pick RPM fights, than on MacPorts...
The [RPM 4.x project][1] is maintained by Panu Matilainen, who
works for Red Hat. The [RPM 5.x project][2] is maintained by Jeff
Johnson, who used to work for Red Hat.
Both projects are GPL-licensed and both are in active development.
RPM 4.6 came out 2009/02/06 and 4.7 beta 1 was released 2009/02/26.
RPM 5.1.7 came out 2009/03/07, the same day as RPM 5.2a3.
Actually rpm5.org uses the LGPL license (i.e. the "Lesser"), not the
GPL.
RPM 4.4.9 was released 2007/05/21, RPM 4.4.2.3 was released 2008/04/01.
Although I know very little about the RPM 5 project, the straight-
forward mechanics of forked projects suggest it is unwise to assume
an rpm package built to work with the RPM 4.x project code will
work seamlessly with an RPM 5-based installation (or vice versa).
This would especially be the case for packages built using versions
of either RPM project released since Red Hat relaunched the 4.x
project in May 2007. Since that relaunch, both projects have
proceeded apace with their code-bases inevitably diverging as a
consequence.
Both projects have forked away from the original 4.4.2 release in 2005.
Nonetheless the two projects are separate and, so far as I'm aware,
aren't checking their changes against each other to ensure
everything works perfectly between the two. Most specifically,
there are differences between the projects concerning what is and
isn't supported in an rpm package's .spec file.
All of which is a long-winded way of suggesting it's possible an
rpm package prepared for use against one RPM project might behave
in an unexpected way if that package is then installed, managed or
otherwise interacted with by the other RPM.
Spec portability shouldn't matter for RPMS built from MacPorts
Portfiles.
The rpm4darwin project noted by Alexy Khrabrov above is based on
RPM 5.
That is not true, rpm4darwin was based on RPM 4.0 - 4.3 from 2001 -
2004.
If you're grabbing binary rpm packages from 'rpm-based distros'
such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, openSUSE or
Mandriva, however, these RPMs were built using RPM 4.
The binary RPM packages for Linux work rather poorly on Darwin, anyway ?
Finally, and FWIW, there are portfiles available for RPM [4.x and
5.x][6], although the 5.x portfiles are closer to being in sync
with upstream.
There are no ports for rpm.org in MacPorts at the moment, only rpm5.org
--anders
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