[Yum] Showing rpm messages before rpm completes

[John Dennis]

On 01/06/2014 02:51 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 11:38 AM, James Antill <james-yum at and.org> wrote:
>>>> Is there any sort of best practice (I'm likely missing) for
>>> accomplishing this sort of thing? I'd like to do things in a typical
>>> manner, but I'm finding yum to be somewhat prohibitive in this area.
>>
>>  If you have something like database initialization, that requires
>> user interaction ... it's common to just not do it at rpm time.
> 
> How is the rpm supposed to communicate to the user that those
> additional steps are needed?   Or, if it set up a new user to own the
> contents, to provide the credentials to access it?

The typical approach is to provide a setup script. The RPM does not run
the script, just installs it. You reference the script and the need to
run it in a README or INSTALL which the RPM also installs in the doc dir.

If the setup steps are Red Hat (e.g. Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, etc.)
specific then it's typical to name the file README.redhat.

BTW, installing a software package seldom means configuring it to run.
Installing is just installing, configuring is something else. Why?
Because it's not unusual to install a package because it *might* be used
later. The idea is the sys admin will make a conscious decision to
configure and enable it. There are exceptions to the "install does not
mean configure and run" rule, but I'm guessing you don't fall into this
small class of packages.


-- 
John