[PLUG] rpm installation help, please

[Karl M. Hegbloom]

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Carla Schroder <pluglist at bratgrrl.com> writes:

> Sandy n Rich, a valiant effort. I hate when someone's idea of help is 
> "apt-get- oh you can't? too bad!"  Those Deb packages are built by human 
> hands, it doesn't take much of a search to find sad forum posts of Deb users 
> having similar problems.

Good point.  They ARE built by human hands... not by quick and dirty
autowraps around the upstream makefiles that neglect silly things like
FHS (Filesystem Heirarchy Standard), stripping binaries, and <gasp>
policy compliance.  (well documented and public policy that is open to
modification through a defined process)

One of the biggest complaints I've heard about non-Debian
distributions is that the packagers often don't take the time to
ensure that files get installed to the correct locations, and things
like that.

Another gripe I have about RPM packages is that the documentation gets
installed with a version number appended to the directory name, like
"/usr/doc/trojanhorse-0.0.1-2", rather than as
"/usr/share/doc/trojanhorse".  With the version number appended like
that, each time you upgrade the software, the URL to the documentation
changes.  You have to update your bookmarks!

 <URL:http://www.pdxlinux.org/dc/>

> Ethereal is a sterling example of how not to build an RPM. I've been fussing 
> with it all afternoon- it's been an interesting education. To heck with the 
> damned RPMs. The machines I use it on, it was installed during the original 
> Linux installation. I'm going to try building from source and see what 
> happens. The libs are on my test system, but not in the RPM database- seems 
> like there was a thread on this not too long ago.

Perhaps if you run into trouble you can download the source and diff
from Debian, and see what they did.

-- 
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the nerves of the body are corroborated thereby. --I. Watts.  .''`.
 Debian -- The blue collar Linux distribution.               : :' :
 <URL:http://www.debian.org/social_contract>		     `. `'