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Re: RPM-4.1 port to cygwin available


Robert Collins wrote:

I find this concern mystifiying though, we've had an rpm port from Chuck
for what - 3 ? 4 ? years.

And mine wasn't the first.


Robert is correct that we've had very few (zero?) reports of "oops I installed a Red Hat Linux rpm and it scrogged my cygwin". We have, however, had a continuing stream of re-re-re-ports of rpm itself (back in the rpm-3.x days) and a dime-a-dozen "better cygwin installation schemes" based around the author's personal re-port of rpm. In each case, they created a short-lived ruckus on this mailing list, and eventually the forked rpm-based cygwin distro died from neglect. [The only proposal along these lines that ever made any sense to me was Dario Alcocer's idea from ~16 months ago, but unfortunately little came of that.]

However, nobody (until now) has ported rpm-4.x to cygwin (AFIAK) -- so that's new. As rpm-4 is a near total rewrite of rpm IIRC, I'm sure it was a major effort. (which is why, among other reasons, I never bothered to update my port) Besides, rpm-4 requires db-4, and I wasn't going to support YA library package. Recently, however, Nicholas Wourms ported and begain maintaining db-2 and db-3 packages, and has db-4 packages "ready to go" -- which makes an rpm-4 port feasible. However, AFAIK the author of this new rpm-4 port built his own version of db-4 and linked to it (statically?). This is not horrible -- it follows Red Hat Linux's own practice: their primary installation tool should NOT have avoidable dynamic external dependencies. That's why the rpm-4 source tarball contains internal copies of both db and popt.

However, we're not Red Hat Linux. Personally, I'd prefer that (a) Nicholas release his db-4 package <g>, and (b) the rpm package eventually accepted into the cygwin distribution be dynamically linked against cygdb-4.1.dll and cygpopt-0.dll.

But, them as writes the code, gets to choose. So this ^^^ is just a bunch of babbling. <g>

--Chuck



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