On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 22:37, David Fitch wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-09-20 at 20:59, Matthew Hannigan wrote:
> > David Fitch wrote:
> > > So the non-interactive rule can't be turned off somewhere?
> > > I can see the benefits of non-interactive installs but this
> > > rpm is going to be a fairly limited release. Sounds like
> > > another limitation of the rpm format.
> >
> > It's a feature!
>
> ah yeah (various comparisons with other OSs spring to mind
> here about forcing you do something the "one true way" but in
> the interests of such a rant not being very helpful I'll refrain
> from going on about it)
(notice how carefully I'm not commenting on distribution bigotry and how
dead the distribution war is)
why does RPM cop so much bad press? It's supposed to be simple. It's not
supposed to be a complete configuration tool. There are *so* many tools
in linux (and particularly in rpm distros I've found) to configure
things. Why does RPM need to replicate this functionality?
The typical method (as I'm sure you're all too aware) is to print out a
message instructing the user to do whatever needs to happen to make
things work.
Can you tell us exactly what needs configuring? or if it's not
configuration, what needs to happen?
I've generally been very happy with the way rpm has set stuff up on this
system. I'd personally be really annoyed if when I asked my computer to
upgrade itself overnight so I could use it the next day I found that I
had to answer 50 questions to get it to do what it could do yesterday.
Sensible defaults and .rpmnew files are a good thing IMHO. They're not
the only way, and of course redhat and rpm are not always the best thing
for the job. Horses for courses, as always.
>
> > If you really really really MUST have some interaction
> > before using, then you can have your rpm install a
> > non-working version, and all have your commands return
> > something like
> >
> > Please run "david-fitch-app --setup"
> >
> > before anything works properly.
>
> hmm well won't work in this case, looks like I'll have to
> provide an install script and pack the lot up as a tarball.
> Hardly worth making an rpm really.
that's certainly one option. I was looking on the ximian web pages today
(desperately wanting them to get mandrake evolution beta packages out
:)) and they had a cute system. It had instructions to su and then run
lynx -source [shellscripturl] | sh
you could have a script that had rpm -ivh [rpm_url] and then ran
whatever postinstall stuff you needed. Then you get the niceness of rpm
-in that it can be uninstalled easily and such, along with your
post-install script and you also get complete control over the rpm
command that gets run so it's one less thing that can go wrong.
HTH,
James.
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