Re: RPM for gnome-libs 1.0.54?

[Zach Frey <zfrey bright net>]

On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 03:37:03PM -0500, Raul Acevedo wrote:
> Zach Frey wrote:
>  >     rpm -ta <tarball>.tar.gz
>  > 
>  > This should generate the source RPM, plus all binary RPMs.
> 
> If this is all it takes to generate binary RPMs, then why:
> 
> 1.  Does GNOME not *always* provide RPMs for every tarball release, given
>     that it's so simple?
 
Miguel et al. would have the "official" answer, but --

   a.  Tarballs are OS-agnostic, RPM is only for RPM-based Linux
       distributions (and those hardy souls who use RPM on other systems).

   b.  RPMs don't work across distributions, thus the proliferation of
       Red Hat X.Y RPMs, SuSE RPMs, etc.

   c.  Miguel has mentioned before (once upon a time when I was complaining
       about out of date .spec files) that the GNOME hackers see themselves
       as trying to create good, solid code, and let other folks worry about
       the details of RPM, Debian, etc. packaging for the specific platforms.

> 2.  Isn't this information on generating RPMs from the tarball given
>     someplace really obvious and easy to find? 
 
   It's there, under 'man rpm'.  But the man page (at least for RPM 2.5)
   was ... more opaque than it should have been, and I actually had to
   ask this question myself once upon a time.



Zach

-- 
I'm sorry for picking on Microsoft, because others do the same
stupid mistake over and over again. It's just that some mistakes
are more obvious. 
  -- Linus Torvalds