Re: StarOffice 5.1 RPM

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Sun, 31 Oct 1999, root wrote:

> > What the hell cpio is doing with an RPM, I don't know.
> RPM uses cpio for its archiving iirc..

Yep, that would explain it. ..

> take a look at the rpm2targz utility
> included with Slackware (well, my Slack4 has it) - nifty little util for
> those who don't like using RPMs.

Hmm, not on freshmeat, but I have the alien source knocking about
somewhere . . . next rainy day , etc., etc., ...

> As for the problem mentioned, i would say that unless your system *IS* Red
> Hat (not Red Hat-based, such as Mandrake), then you can't guarantee that
> all RPMs will work.

Well, I'm not running RedHat, and it works for me. StarOffice doesn't need
any particular RedHat inconsistency to work: it installs to opt/soffice (I
think), it's precompiled, so it doesn't expect libraries to be in the RH
places. It's just wierd, it ought to work on *any* machine. RPM is an open
standard . . . I don't believe RPM is the cause of half the problems most
people make out it is. It might be worth doing an rpm --verify on the
offending package in question: that might highlight something.

Given that it's cpio that has failed, perhaps you don't have a good enough
version of cpio?? What was the distro. that SO failed to install under?
Could be that cpio isn't a good enough version for RPM, and that RPM is
asking it to do something it can't do..... ? ;)

> I think maybe a nice touch on the LA covercd would be
> to include gzipped tarballs a well as the RPMs.

Well, we were talking about the PC+ cover cd, but yes, I agree with you
completely. All my software is PGCC optimised: if I upgrade my KDE with
the PC+ rpms, say, I only have 386 software. Some people think it makes no
difference, personally, I think it does. I also like to be able to tweak
the source to cut out some of the layers of blubber around such software
if possible. .SRPMs are a nice way of doing things. I don't like tarballs
for the simple reason of dependancies; I want to be told what else I need
to compile software. But apart from that, I'd rather have source than
compiled binaries. I guess it's all a question of disk space . . .which is
why PC+ is planning on doing a limited DVD run next month. Ho hum, another
year, another mass-storage medium . . . ;)

Cheers,

Alex.

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