On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Guy Harris wrote:
> Should "ethereal.spec.in" be moved to an "rpm" subdirectory of
> "packaging, and the Makefile.am files updated as necessary so that one
> can make RPMs with "make rpm" or something such as that, if that's
> possible?
That was my goal. On Red Hat at least, rpms can be built by dropping the
spec file into /usr/src/redhat/SPECS and the distribution tarball into
/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES and then calling the correct invocation of "rpm".
So we should be able to move ethereal.spec.in into packages/rpm. I'm not
sure if the current spec file is general enough to create packages for
not-Red-Hat-but-rpm-based-nonetheless systems such as Mandrake and SuSE,
however. We may have to make separate "redhat", "mandrake", and "suse"
directories if this isn't the case.
> Are Solaris binary packages just SVR4 packages and, if so, can that
> packaging mechanism be used to make packages for any other SVR4-flavored
> UNIXes? If so, the subdirectory might want to be renamed "svr4", and
> the Makefile rules changed to say "svr4".
The packages are built using pkgproto and pkgmk. The documentation on
docs.sun.com hints that the process is SVR4-compliant, but doesn't say so
explicitly. The "checkinstall" script is pretty Solaris- and
SPARC-specific, but it shouldn't be too hard to generalize it.
Things might get confusing if, for instance, RPM becomes a popular
packaging format on Solaris. Maybe the Makefile targets should be named
"<OS>-<package format>-package", e.g. "linux-rpm-package" or
"suse-rpm-package".