[Yum] Enhancing the potential of yum to support commercial enterprise...

Joe Cooper joe at swelltech.com
Sat Aug 9 16:31:56 UTC 2003


Robert G. Brown wrote:

> Yeah, but remember the proposed application space -- ONLY for packages
> that installed "data" or "noarch" things with no intrinsic architecture
> dependence.  So shared libraries and "relocatability" in the sense that
> relative or absolute paths are preserved is mostly irrelevant.  Not
> trying to build binary thingies that will install in /usr, /usr/local,
> /usr/share, /opt, or $HOME equally with rpm --relocate /usr=/opt, which
> I have no doubt is very difficult indeed.
> 
> Think slackware packages -- glorified tarballs with an internal
> installation script would be adequate.  However, slackware packages
> aren't terribly satisfactory because of their relatively weak versioning
> and obsoleting and dependencies.  It would indeed be lovely to require
> jpilot and/or pilot-xfer for a package installing pilot db's and
> software.  It would be nice to require xmms or some other ogg player as
> a dependency of an ogg-based music package.  Or think e-books, with an
> associated e-book reader (or one of several, all open source).  Or drug
> databases.  There are all sorts of markets for packaged DATA, but most
> of it doesn't need to be and in fact shouldn't be installed as root.  
> 
> At the moment linux seems to lack an idiot-proof (simple) mechanism for
> versioned, dependencied, checksummed distribution of pure (possibly
> volatile) data to users.  rpm's have the intrinsic features but rpm
> itself does not.  yum (even from the command line) is simple enough to
> qualify as an idiot proof and automagical front end for rpm, and if/when
> a nice GUI wrapper is written for yum (perhaps capable even of fronting
> a user's cron, at least wrt scheduling yum updates) then yum+rpm+web
> could become the net's next killer app, at least for people buying data.

Perhaps your user data is different than the data I need to distribute, 
but mine stays mostly the same between revisions--in a 10MB file, maybe 
250KB changes.  I've been trying to figure out how to do a clean 
versioned rsync-based packaging scheme, maybe even one that can update 
the RPM DB with its version info, but it hasn't come to me in a vision 
yet, nor has my spirit guide shown me the way.  I may have to resort to 
formal design process and other such voodoo.
-- 
Joe Cooper <joe at swelltech.com>
Web caching appliances and support.
http://www.swelltech.com




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