Setup RPM

From SpareMiNT Wiki

This is the RPM Package Manager rpm version 3.0.2 for MiNT. This software is a most powerful tool both for developers and end users to keep track of the thousands of files found in an average MiNT installation. It makes installing, uninstalling or update software packages a piece of cake.

For more informations, see the RPM FAQ

[edit] Prerequisites

RPM requires some additional software to work. What you will need is

• tar and gzip
• optionally bzip2
• some other stuff that it will complain about when not found.
• optionally pgp and gpg
• cpio

The last program (cpio) is not included in the KGMD, you have to get it somewhere. You can probably get it from where you got rpm itself. In fact I think that you don't necessarily need it to bootstrap rpm. But if rpm complains about a missing cpio you know what went wrong.

Unfortunately some program paths are hardcoded into rpm and these hardcoded paths reflect my own setup (your mileage may vary). If rpm ever complains for example about cpio missing run

rpm --showrc

and look where rpm expects cpio. Then either copy your cpio program there, or link it. Another way would be to load rpm into your favorite binary editor and change the paths by hand.

[edit] Installing

To install the package just type

rpm -ivh rpm-3.0.1-1.m68kmint.rpm

into your shell and thats it.

Ooops, you don't have rpm? OK, we then need to find a way to install it by hand. In this directory you will find three sub-directories bin, var and usr. These directories should reflect your installation in the root filesystem /. You can either copy the directory structure file by file or:

tar cvf untarme.tar bin usr var
cd /
tar xvf untarme.tar

This will install all files in the right places.

The other files are not necessary to run rpm. They are for information only.

[edit] Initialization

RPM needs a properly set up database in order to get it working. You will have to initialize that database now. Dont worry, it's really simple:

rpm --initdb

zzt, zzt, and that's it. If you have an earlier version of rpm installed (notably everything < 2.5.x) you should do

rpm --rebuilddb

instead.

If rpm ever complains that you need the feature perl if you try to install a package, add perl to that line:

Provides: /bin/sh perl

into /etc/rpmrc. This hack will be unnecessary as soon as Perl is available as real rpms for MiNT. My /etc/rpmrc currently looks like that:

# /etc/rpmrc''
# Site-specific things for rpm.''
Provides: perl''
optflags: m68kmint -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer''

The second line with optflags is only necessary if you want to build from sources (and it will hopefully not be necessary at all in the future).

[edit] Bugs

RPM for MiNT has inherited one major shortcoming from MiNT itself: Under most Unix systems it is possible to temporarily change the file system root. For example ftp servers do this to make anonymous login safer. They change the filesystem root to /home/ftp with a minimal set of user programs in /home/ftp/bin and thus prevent anonymous users from messing around on the host's file system.

This doesn't work yet with MiNT, the chroot system call is emulated by the effectively useless chdir. You will find out that rpm will sometimes behave not the way it is described when it makes use of that feature.

At the time of this writing (July 1999) beta kernels already have a system call Pchroot so that this will probably be fixed soon.

[edit] Documentation

I have included the RPM-HOWTO (you will find it in /usr/doc/HOWTO/RPM-HOWTO) in this binary distribution. It is a very good starting point both for end users and developers. If you want to get more information you should read the book Maximum RPM by Edward C. Bailey which is available for purchase (in printed form) or anonymous ftp from ftp.redhat.com (either as PostScript or LaTeX).

Beware, both the RPM-HOWTO and Maximum RPM are obsolete because rpm has undergone some major changes in design between rpm 2.x and rpm 3.x. However, both documents are still a valuable source of information and rpm 3.x will warn you if you try to use obsoleted features.

Other ways to get information are the rpm(8) and rpm2cpio(8) manpages included here or simply

rpm --help

which you may want to pipe through a pager because it displays an imposing list of options (which can even be extended by you, read about popt macros).

If you hate to read documentation you will probably get along with a handful of commands. Say you have a binary rpm foobar-1.0-1.m68kmint.rpm. What What can you do with this?

rpm --ivh foobar-1.0-1.m68kmint.rpm

This will install the foobar package. If you later want to know which files belong to the foobar package you do

rpm -ql foobar

and rpm will list all files that belong to it. You could get the same information before actually installing by querying the package file itself:

rpm -qpl foobar-1.0-1.m68kmint.rpm

If you later come across a file /usr/bin/foobar and you don't know what it is good for do

rpm -qf /usr/bin/foobar

and you will learn that it belongs to the foobar package. If you want to know what the foobar package is good for ask rpm either by

rpm -qi foobar''
rpm -qpi foobar-1.0-1.m68kmint.rpm''
rpm -qfi /usr/bin/foobar''

If this information shows you that the foobar package is absolutely useless and a waste of disk space get rid of it:

rpm -e foobar

but if you like it and you want to install the brand-new update, do

rpm -Uvh ftp://sparemint.org/pub/sparemint/sparemint/RPMS/m68kmint/rpm-3.0.6-4.m68kmint.rpm

This will update your current installation of the foobar package (and you have learned that you can specify a URL found somewhere on the net just as well as a filename on your local harddisk to install or query packages).

BTW, you can always use the -U (update) option instead of -i (install). Generally using -U is equivalent to -i but using -i when you really update a package will fail because rpm will tell you that your update conflicts with the old installation. You can either erase the old package before your update or - the recommended way - use the update option and you will benefit from all precautions the author of the program and the packager have taken to make that update flawless. Depending on the design of the package this will automatically modify configuration files, save backups of old versions or whatsoever.

From time to time you want (or need) to know, i.e for updating, what packages you have installed you can use this

rpm -qa | grep -e "foobar"

The pipe "|" will give the output of rpm -qa to the command grep. Grep is searching trough the output for the expression (-e) you have given.