Re: Stow

[Paul Sander]

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>There is allways a mixture of architectures! Even if it is a
>linux-only setup, you can be sure that there are (or at least that
>there will eventually be) different distributions!

That's like saying that Solaris 2.4 and Solaris 2.9 are different
architectures.  I don't believe that.  All Linux distributions to my
knowledge understand RPM, and nearly all Linux installations are on
x86 machines.

What I'm talking about with regard to different architectures is more
like Linux vs. HP-UX, where there are fundamental differences between
the machines the administrators need to manage.

>Administrators will
>hardly learn how to use *one* package management tool, let alone many;
>and I don't mean learn to say "rpm -i", "rpm -e", and "rpm -qa", but
>learn the internals of the packager, and how to write spec-files, or
>whatever is needed to create packages.

Most IT departments have one or two people who are given automation
tasks.  Such people can easily write scripts to produce spec files
from a directory tree, then invoke the tool that produces the package.

>Personally I see stow as a
>cross-platform tool for managing software that doesn't come
>pre-packaged. That is: If something comes in an RPM, fine, use it. If
>it doesn't and you have to install from sources, use stow! It's ten
>times easier to learn how to use stow, than to refresh you memory on
>how to write a spec-file. I 've tried the other way a couple of times
>(i.e. build an RPM for everything you install) and the result was
>allways to start cutting corners and eventually install everything
>under "/opt/<package-name>".

I'd say you haven't tried hard enough to write your spec file generator.
It's not exactly rocket science.  From what I've seen, it's little more
than a find/awk pipe.

Anyway, this it way off-topic, so I'll stop here.

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