Re: Slashdot discussion

"Prasanth A. Kumar" wrote:
>
> Travis Bauer <trbauer@indiana.edu> writes:
>
> > Once I ran into a guy who said that the postgres rpm was broken in Red Hat
> > 5.2.  This was when I was first getting into postgres.  I spent some time
> > with it and realized that there were a number of things that had to be
> > done before it would work: creating the postgres users, initializing the
> > database, getting something into rc.d so it would boot up
> > automatically.  The RPM was not broken, but it was a pain to get postgres
> > running unless you spent some time reading about it.  My experience with
> > MySQL was less painful, although dealing with user permissions was more
> > complex.
> <snip>
>
> The current Red Hat RPMS do create the postgres user and initialize
> the database but doesn't define any of the environment variables.

And where should they be defined?  /etc/profile, perhaps?  Do I really
want ot go there with ENVVARS?  (maybe I do -- maybe I don't :-))

> One
> minor comment about the RPMS at the postgress website... The current
> standard in Red Hat RPMS is to gzip all man pages because the man
> program will automatically decompress them. If you run a RPM through
> the program rpmlint, it will provide some useful warning about other
> potential packing problems also...

The only other rpmlint-able problem with the 7.0.2-2 set is the dangling
symlink of os.h in -devel (which will be fixed in the next release).
(and rpmlint's broken idea of file and directory permissions, which are
set the way they are for a reason...., and its broken idea of Vendor and
Distribution......).

The man pages are compressed in the latest RawHide release -- however,
due to my desire for cross-distribution capability with these RPM's,
since each distribution seems to have a different idea of where things
ought to go, and what format they ought to be in... --buildpolicy in the
latest RPM version fixes this sort of thing.  The spec file itself is
built with this in mind, allowing for the manpages to be compressed in
any format or not compressed at all (due to the use of the appended * in
the %files listing). Of course, that is a build-time thing -- my goal is
not binary RPM compatibility, but SOURCE RPM compatibility.

But, thanks for the critique anyway! :-)

--
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11