Re: SuSE RPMs available for PostgreSQL 7.4

On Wednesday 19 November 2003 12:49 pm, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Lamar Owen writes:
> > The place they were put.  The 'customary place' has been
> > v{version}/RPMS/{distribution} so that they would be in
> > pub/binary/v7.4/RPMS/suse-{version}.  Their source RPM would go there
> > too.

> SRPMS        containing a source RPM
> distrib-1    above source RPM built for that distribution
> distrib-2    above source RPM built for that distribution
> other-distrib    containing different source RPM and binary RPM

> But that is assymetric.

Yes, it is.  However, it has been done before when it made sense to do so.

> So the solution was to put each RPM set, consisting of a source RPM and
> binaries built from it, in its own subdirectory.

That solution has the disadvantage of either storing multiple identical source
RPM's or maintaining multiple links to the single source RPM.  There will be
a fedora-core-1, a redhat-9, and redhat-8.0, a redhat-7.3, an aurora-1.0, and
possibly a redhat-6.2 that will hopefully use the single source RPM.  Now I
can maintain links to the single one, or I can waste 10MB of space per
distribution.  But I didn't do it that way, putting the 'canonical' source
RPM into a separate SRPMS dir, since the idea of the single source RPM was to
be distribution-independent.

> That solution also has the advantage that if someone wanted to post other
> binaries, say for Debian or Solaris, they could become a peer directory of
> "suse".  That way, someone looking for binaries could follow the name of
> the operating system and would not have to know details about which
> packaging system is used.

There are advantages to that, I'll admit.  However, one could have an RPM for
Solaris, for instance, in addition to the regualr Solaris packages, since RPM
will install on Solaris.  Debian packages haven't historically been stored on
ftp.postgresql.org.  Win32 binaries have been put alongside the RPMS
directory before.
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu