[lsb-discuss] RPM build tool

Theodore Tso tytso at mit.edu
Tue Aug 12 12:55:47 PDT 2008


On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 01:27:26PM -0600, Wichmann, Mats D wrote:
> or maybe it's an indication that rpm, which has already dealt with
> all of this stuff and is well proven, should be encouraged instead of
> dismissed.  it's one thing if we have people with existing packaging
> mechanisms who want to use those on all their products, including
> Linux ones.  but if they're going to adopt a tool that's Linux-only
> anyway,  as this one would be,  then why not stick with rpm?

The argument has been that some ISV's are willing to deal with
platform specific packaging tools, since they have today for Windows,
Solaris, AIX, Macos, etc.  

However, they don't want a tool which takes over how they build
things, and RPM fundamentally assumes that you start with a source
tarball plus patches.  This means that in order to use RPM you have to
rototill your entire build proess.  This is especially bad for ISV's
who want to build out of source code management system, and where the
sources are big enough that needing to package them all up into a
gigundo tarball just to make RPM happy is not what they are looking
for.  (Or some ISV's built several binary components out of separate
SCM repositories, and then combine them together when producing a
release --- this can be espeially problematic given how rpmbuild
forces all projets to fit into the same procrustean bed.)

Of course, something else we can do is just bits and pieces of RPM
(such as the part that parses the %files section of the spec file, if
nothing else) and just incorporate it into makelsbrpm.

	      	       		      	   - Ted



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