[Pipet Devel] RPM for the local app broker?

J.W. Bizzaro bizzaro at bc.edu
Thu Apr 8 18:53:28 EDT 1999


Humberto wrote:
>
> When I was writing the proposal, I thought it wold be neat to have a file type
> like "multifile python module" that contained the source to a viewer, we could
> also have a type like "i386/libc6/rpm" for a viewer.  The app broker can
> return a list like
> 
> python - ftp://bar.baz/pub/viewer.py
> compressed-multifile-python-tarfile - ftp://bar.baz/pub/fancy-viewer.tar.gz
> i386/libc6/rpm - ftp://rpmfind.net/libc6/i386/viewer1.0-2.rpm
> 
> and the user can select which one he wants to retreive.

This brings up an interesting thought: How about using RPM or a modified version
of it for our locus database (managed by the local app broker).

If you think about it, we need some system to

    (1) Install new loci
    (2) Upgrade old loci
    (3) Remove loci
    (4) Check version numbers
    (5) Check dependencies
    (6) and store all sorts of info on the loci

That sounds like RPM to me.

Now, I'm thinking that we could actually use RPM, but there would be two
problems:

    (1) RPM installs etc. under root
    (2) Not every UNIX system uses RPM, in fact only about half of the Linux
systems

But what if we modified it (it's GPL) to install etc. in the user's directory?

Another advantage to RPM is that it compresses the package, which will make it
easier to download those pesty viewers.  So we'll define...

    i386/libc6/locus - ftp://locusfind.net/libc6/i386/viewer1.0-2.locus

Oh yeah, and we can use the RPM-to-HTML rpmfind database for browsing loci
available on the Web.


So, WHAT DA YA THINK?


Jeff
-- 
J.W. Bizzaro                  mailto:bizzaro at bc.edu
Boston College Chemistry      http://www.uml.edu/Dept/Chem/Bizzaro/
--



More information about the Pipet-Devel mailing list