On Apr 10, 2008, at 2:10 AM, Eliyahu Skoczylas wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Apr 2008 16:04:48 -0500 (CDT), "Tim Mooney"
> <mooney@dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak.edu> said:
>> In regard to: Re: Help: Installing RPM on Solaris 8, Eliyahu  
>> Skoczylas
>> said...:
>>> Jeff Johnson wrote:
>>>> On Apr 9, 2008, at 3:33 PM, Eliyahu Skoczylas wrote:
>>>>> 4.4.9 would best keep us in sync with the CentOS version 4.3.3  
>>>>> that another
>>>>> team member has started playing with, and should be most  
>>>>> interoperable in
>>>>> terms of of .spec files.
>>>> Not true. There are already significant changes in rpm-4.4.9 that
>>>> are very different than rpm-4.3.3.
>>> I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that if the Linux  
>>> team wrote
>>> .spec files that ran under 4.3.3 / Linux that they should run  
>>> pretty well
>>> under 4.4.9 / Solaris.
>> If you write your spec files to work with rpm 4.3.3, rpm 4.4.9  
>> shouldn't
>> have any problem with them.  Neither should 5.0.3.  It would be  
>> more of
>> a problem to write your spec files for 5.0.3 and then try use them  
>> with
>> 4.3.3.
>
> So long as there is full backwards compatibility for 5.0.3 to support
> .spec files written for 4.3.3, then it seems that I should commit to
> building 5.0.3 for Solaris, and leave the Linux guys going along with
> 4.3.3 for now.  Of course, given that we have a platform split to go
> with the version split, we could start putting RPM 5 macros in %ifarch
> or %ifos blocks....
>

Bckwards compatibility for rpm-5.0.3 being able to parse rpm-4.3.3
spec files is present.

Meanwhile, backwards compatibility is rather less useful that one
would expect since build environments are too different. The idea
that one can just take RHEL4 *.src.rpm's and build them on other
platforms is unlikely to be viable in practice.

At some point its easier to just have separate spec's than to deal
with the litter of %ifarch and %ifos logic necessary to handle
differences between platforms.

> In the future, we're going to be adding a GUI component on top of the
> RPM, and at that time it would be logical for me to upgrade the
> underlying platform to talk to RPM 5 for everyone, but allow the .spec
> files to keep being written against 4.3.3 until everyone has come  
> up to
> 5.0 (or probably 5.1+, by then.)
>
>> If it would help, I can try figure out all the software I had to  
>> install
>> before I got rpm 4.4.9 to build.  The list is longer for Solaris 8  
>> than
>> it was for Solaris 10.  I was just operating under the assumption  
>> that
>> the list was fairly well documented in 5.0.3.
>
> Thanks for the offer, but if I'm continuing with 5.0.3, as seems to be
> the consensus here, then that probably is more work for you than it
> would be a help for me. :)  The documentation for RPM 5's immediate
> requirements is pretty good, it's just that the chain of  
> dependencies to
> build the tools and libraries that I need for RPM is so extensive  
> that I
> need a package manager to coordinate it all! :D
>
> I guess the one question remaining for me to explain to my boss is the
> one I threw out last night before going to bed -- whether to keep
> plugging along with the GNU environment or to take a step back and  
> build
> 5.0.3 using strictly Sun tools and libraries.
>

If the tool chain is the issue, then you ought to look at OpenPKG binary
packages, which are high quality and consistently maintained for
a variety of platforms.

73 de Jeff