On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:33:51 +0530, Devdas Bhagat devdas-B/gC27/pXbteH41UXmfQsti2O/JbrIOy@public.gmane.org said:
On 28/02/07 10:05 -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
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chmod, ar and tar. rpm's need a special tool. Now, why is this important at all? Well, think of a classified environment, where you do not want to rely on the packaged tool to help you with forensics; but you have a trusted solaris box.
A unix system without cpio? RPM is essentially cpio with a specified header format.
Actually, no: it is a modified cpio. The implementation is pretty close, but it has some behaviors which are more to RPM's liking. If you take a plain old cpio from Solaris/Aix/HPUX et al you'll find that you can't really inspect/create rpm files.
Which is why we have rpm2cpio package, it converts the rpm to standard cpio format. If it was a plain old cpio, you would not need rpm2cpio.
- Debian packages may run binaries at install and un-install times. I am not sure if this is a major plus.
RPMS can run binaries from pre and post install sections. This is not a major plus, and in some environments can be a major minus.
Well, not if you wanted to do a preinst, and the binary you want to run is inside the package. See, the package has not been unpacked yet, just hte spec file is available -- or the debian maintainer scripts.
So, debian's preinst can be a binary program, as well as a postrm -- but the rpm spec file can't do that, since the binary it could refer to would not be available.
It is not a major issue, and Debian specifically prohibits it in policy; but it is a technical difference.
manoj