Gentoo patches [was Re: [CLUE-Tech] Escape from RH 8.0]

[Collins]

On Sunday 02 March 2003 11:16 pm, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> On 02 Mar 2003 22:33:06 -0700
>
> Ed Hill <ed at eh3.com> wrote:
> > Ok, I'm not trying to turn this into a flame war but heres a *practical*
> > question: if you are given a closed-source binary-only set of RPMs with
> > non-trivial dependencies (eg. NI's LabVIEW), how would you go about
> > installing it on gentoo?  Have any of you solved this problem?
> >
> > This is not a made-up or theoretical example.  I use LabVIEW on Linux on
> > an almost daily basis and they ship it as a bunch of RPMs.  I'd like to
> > try other distros but it seems like a lot of effort only to wind up with
> > a system that will be difficult (?) to use in conjunction with our
> > commercial apps.
>
> The thing that might save you, is that RPMs are CPIO files.
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=rpm2cpio <- pick one
>
> I haven't had huge successes unpacking RPMs and messing with them though.
> I don't remember what happened when I tried it. I think cpio was being a
> pain, something about not getting the files to wind up where I wanted
> them. But, using rpm2cpio -> cpio, you should be able to get all the files
> out.
>
> IIRC, rpm2cpio is a Perl script. Not a very fancy one either.
>

Nothing prevents you from installing RPM on gentoo (there is a standard RPM 
ebuild) and using it for commercial aps.  Most likely you will need to do 
manual dependancy checking and use --nodeps or --force to get the beasts 
installed, since the RPMs probably won't find the gentoo libraries in the 
expected locatiuon.  If the software is important enough, you could modify 
the RPM spec files to match the gentoo setup.  After a little study, you 
could also repackage the binaries as gentoo ebuilds.  For example, gentoo 
installs a phoenix binary package

With any such software, it is important to watch for updates to any of the 
dependancies that might break the commercial aps.

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
Athlon-XP gentoo 1.4_rc2 kde 3.1