eCS 2.2 YUM/RPM question

[Sigurd Fastenrath]

I am not interested in a debate wheter it makes sence or not to include YUM/RPM in eCS, there are several other places do discuss this.

Some questions came to my mind related to this:

The readme of YUM/RPM advice to have a partition with at least 5GB space for it

If so needed, does that mean

1. there is a minimum space of 6GB required for a "full" install of eCS 2.2?

2. will the installer quit if there is less or deselect RPM/YUM applications (JAVA, ODIN, QT I guess)

3. has YUM/RPM to be installed on the boot drive or is it possible to install it on a seperate drive?

4. or do one have to have two partitions for the installation (one for OS one for YUM/RPM) allways?

5. If it is necessary to install YUM/RPM on the bootdrive - does it will go in a seperate folder or "mess up" the whole boot drive with the needed folder structure?

Thanks for bringing some light here.



 

[Andy Willis]

I have not seen the 2.2 installer and I am not associated with Mensys or Serenity so this is in no way authoritative but just reasoning from what I do know.
1.  This would only be true if the answer to ? 3 is that RPM/YUM must be on the boot drive (as the question comes from the RPM/YUM readme).
2.  I do not know if RPM/YUM will be installed if you do not select installing anything that requires it or if it will also have its own selection etc.
3.  RPM/YUM can be installed to another partition so I would expect the eCS installer would allow that as well.  The same partition you install RPM/YUM to will also be where everything it installs goes to.
4.  There is no reason a requirement for multiple partitions would exist if someone were to want one large partition with OS and RPM/YUM and applications installed to.
5.  If RPM/YUM had to be put to the boot drive then it would mess up the whole boot drive.  RPM/YUM might be put into a separate folder with its structure under by setting the unixroot=X:\rpmyum but the readme says that is untested but I don't know if there are any known issues with it.  I haven't seen anything in the RPM/YUM timeline suggesting any fixes have been made to RPM/YUM to allow it if there are any known issue (or whether anyone has tested that there are no issues so that it will just be allowed).  As the readme has a warning about not being on the root of the drive I doubt the eCS installer will be setup to put it into its own folder but I can't say that hasn't been addressed either.

[ivan]

Andy, thank you for trying to answer the questions but it would be nice to have definitive answers to those questions from the developers.

[Sigurd Fastenrath]

Andy, thank you for trying to answer the questions but it would be nice to have definitive answers to those questions from the developers.

Sorry for this "double posting" at ecomstation yahoogroup as well, I wanted to start there but my first text there seemed not to reach the group, but then it appeared about half an hour after I wrote it.
So there is some more information here:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/eComStation/message/87747

Thanks for all the answers but it is still not clear to me.

[melf]

Mensys (Roderick) gave some  answers on news.ecomstation.com (support.misc) for a couple of days ago. However I can't find them anymore. That was to some degree informative but I still also find it unclear.

The message to my own questions  was that 1) yum/rpm could be installed on an optional drive, 2) that there was, so far, no easy way to trace where a package of files had been installed; it was said that a GUI possibly could contribute with that and that a GUI was planned.

My own plan is to give yum/rpm a good try, I think on a separate computer, to see how it works and feels in the longer term.

[Andi B.]

...no easy way to trace where a package of files had been installed...

I guess most of the executables ends in %unixroot%/usr/bin or %unixroot%/usr/sbin as with other *nix systems. Configuration is often placed in %unixroot%/etc but this depends on the application too of course.

Although this means you loose some kind of control over the place where some programs are installed, it's not that bad as it sounds at first. Guess yum/rpm installation will only be used for ported utilities and applications. Hardly anyone will ever pack native OS/2 apps into rpm. So you do not have the usual level of control only for packages you did not have in the past anyway. You do not loose something but you get new ported stuff. And for this kind of apps you have to 'learn' some of the *nix paradigms anyway. Like finding the config which is on *nix usually not in an ini file (os2.ini or some ini in the programs directory or in mptn/etc or....?) but in %unixroot%/etc.

If you want to use parts of both worlds (OS/2 and *nix) then you have to know how to handle both of them. The OS/2 knowledge you gained during the last decades is not enough anymore. Time to learn something new....

[melf]

Hi Andi, if it worked that way I guess it'll be quite okey. But both Java and Odin will be packed in rpm too and I think the plan is to also include e.g. Firefox in such packages. I would be surprised if not OpenOffice also will be packed as rpm, at least in some near future. As said I'm going to try it out for a longer time and see how the whole thing will work out and how high the learning curve is if you want to remain in sufficient control  .

[ivan]

Andi B, I have found the biggest problem with *nix systems is that they follow Hal from the film and always come out with the equivalent of 'I'm sorry Dave but I can't let you do that' when I try to alter some text file that they use as an ini file.

The other thing I think we need is a program like WPIVIEW only for the rpm/yum installer.  That way we could find out what is going on.

[Silvan Scherrer]

please also see http://svn.netlabs.org/rpm/wiki/RpmHowToEndUsers it explains some needed yum/rpm commands. With those it's easy to find out which app installed which files. And also which packages are installed at all.
And yes we are aware of the need of a gui. It will come once.

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

Hardly anyone will ever pack native OS/2 apps into rpm.

That would be possible: YUM is flexible enough. I don't think that
will happen soon or ever, because it's a lot of work to repackage
every single eCS and OS/2 system component.

I wish Mensys had used such an installer from the beginning. Maybe
we were already at the status that IBM's "migration" would be
superfluous and every e.g. ACPI, Panorama or USB update would easy
to do and to revert for everyone then.

[Gregg Young]

I found the post that Melf  mentioned. It is below. In the same massage chain Alex Taylor stated you would be able to deselect YUM/RPM during an advanced install which would also mean Odin, QT and JAVA would not be installed. Currently, you could install each of them later using warpin if you wished.

Gregg

As to the installer discussion, next sextion.

Over the years I have realy done a lot research. For starters I do think the complete discussion about YUM/RPM is so blown up out of propertion until you look at the facts. YUM/RPM is just another installer.

And yes to answer Melf his questions (see below). The runtime for YUM/RPM we already have a downscaled version that is 70 MB. Still a lot. But then again the new internal eCS 2.2 ISO comes with CUPS that eats about 100MB of disc space Its going to be used for QT, Jave 6 and ODIN.

Let me first address the first point. If you look at the standard IBM
installer and the eCS installer it is already complex web of installers.
Take a look at the Local System-> Install/remove folder.

For years I have been trying to move away from RSPINST.EXE from IBM.
I looked at trying to see how we could repackage the stuff that is in \OS2IMAGE\DISK_XX. Alex recently took a small look at it.
And the versions of RSPINST and what does is not very well documented.
I made several brave attempts to try and document the complete thing that RSPINST does.

In eCS 1.2R and higher there is a new version of minstall. That was the result of 3 to 4 months hard work from Martin Kiewitz and testing from my side. Thats just another installer with another file format.

To make a list:

RSPSINST (install.exe, selective install not being rescriptable).
PEER installer (installs IBM file and printer sharing)
MPTS (runs in CID mode has down old ZIP architecture in place)
CLIFI (used by base install such as Java and TCP/IP apps)
IBM application installer (like netscape 4.61)
Minstall (own file format for response files)
We added Warpin to eCS.

Now we also looked at creating a single uninstall program for these insallers so one tool you could run that would query the different database's. But that proved to be more difficult then we thought.

The web of IBM installers came about because IBM had different departments working on these components for OS/2 (I was told).
Its a pitty the powerPC installer never made to the x86 version of OS/2/. I was told that was a single installer for the complete OS.

Summary. we never communicated all of this stuff. But a lot of R&D
takes place to try and remove some of the old installers and move to
a more unified system. As for RPM/YUM to answer Melf his questions:


Question 1 from Melf:
"> Will yum/rpm force every program to install to a standard location or does that just concern *nix ports?"

It is possible and we want to offer the choice (just like now) to install programs at least to different drive letter. We also have the klib path rewriter. So it should make it possible.

Question 2 from Melf:
"Will yum/rpm provide an easy way to trace where files to a cetain installation are installed?"

That would rather be a feature of a GUI.

Question 3 from Melf:
"Will yum/rpm tolerate that you make manual adjustments, e.g exchanging certain files of certain reasons? "

What do you mean with this last question.

So RPM/YUM will not replace in eCS 2.2 the current installers. That would be to much work for the release of eCS 2.2. tIts going to be used for new components.

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V.

[Alex Taylor]

RPM will be in eCS 2.2 beta.  The basic install includes the RPM framework, EMX, GCC4CORE, kLIBC, COREUTILS and Python.  (If you choose not to install RPM, then GCC4CORE, EMX and COREUTILS will be installed from their older standalone packages.)

The following eCS components will be installed using RPM/YUM

• Odin (required for Flash 11 and Java 6)
• QT4

It's somewhat possible that Flash and/or Java might be repackaged for RPM but I don't expect that to happen before the public beta.  (Note that while Flash and Java are not themselves installed via RPM at the moment, they both require Odin, which is - therefore you do have to install RPM in order to install either Flash or Java during eCS install.)

BTW, ivan: Since eCS 2.1, the include Archive Viewer utility can view and extract RPM files.

[ivan]

Thanks for that bit of information Alex.  When you say view them do you mean just getting a list or actually extracting them - in other words do we now have a fully functional 7z?

I have to admit that I find it rather strange that Odin would be installed using RPM/YUM or are they trying to replace warpin?

[Sigurd Fastenrath]

Thanks for all the answers, but I still have no idea about my questions:

1. there is a minimum space of 6GB required for a "full" install of eCS 2.2? +
3. has YUM/RPM to be installed on the boot drive or is it possible to install it on a seperate drive?
(as these depend on each other)

2. will the installer quit if there is less or deselect RPM/YUM applications (JAVA, ODIN, QT I guess)
4. or do one have to have two partitions for the installation (one for OS one for YUM/RPM) allways?
5. If it is necessary to install YUM/RPM on the bootdrive - does it will go in a seperate folder or "mess up" the whole boot drive with the needed folder structure?

Sorry, but I am not able to find the answers to that - "simple" - questions.

As far as I understand the whole YUM/RPM is needed to install ODIN and QT - as JAVA and Flash are not ready....

The most important questions of these are to me:

Does YUM/RPM hast to be installed on the Bootdrive and will it go in a seperat folder?

Might it be possible to answer this easy question with an easy YES or NO?  - > Thanks in Advance!

[Andi B.]

Although answered numerous times here again what I can say from the top of my head -

3) no, yes
4) no
5) 3 dirs are created at root. AFAIR /usr /etc /var

Might it be possible to answer this easy question with an easy YES or NO?  - > Thanks in Advance!

No. As you see above I needed a little more for 5) 

I could give here links to the netlabs rpm sites and readmes, but this is would be more than YES or NO too....