[wplug] I'm a Linux whimp (need kernel help)

[Chester R. Hosey]

On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 16:05 -0400, Jonathan Billings wrote:
> On 8/15/05, Chester R. Hosey <Chester.Hosey at gianteagle.com> wrote:
> > Even unpacking a SRPM is a pain -- rpm2cpio? What for? Why isn't RPM
> > based on standard format in the first place?
> 
> What's a standard format?  CPIO is a pretty common archive format.  I
> tried and failed to find an RFC for a "standard" for packaging an
> installable binary and documentation.

I don't believe that RPM _is_ CPIO -- thus the need for rpm2cpio. I'd be
quite happy if RPM files could be manipulated directly with cpio.

Debian uses ar format (you can extract a .deb with ar directly),
Slackware uses .tar.gz, etc.

Using a standard archiving format means that one can rely on standard
tools to allow for manipulating (extracting, for instance) the binary
packages without relying on the package management tools to duplicate
that functionality.

I can untar a Slackware archive, make modifications, and tar it back up
quite easily. Ditto Debian packages. If I want to make a minor change to
an RPM, however (such as changing a configuration default, or modifying
a postinst script), I have to jump through hoops since I can't just
unpack, edit, and repack.

Basically I'd sometimes be able to treat the binary package like what it
is -- a binary archive which holds files. I have not encountered a
reason RPM should have to disallow convenient manipulation.

Does that make more sense?

Chet