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From: Jan-Jaap van der Heijden
Subject: GNU Pascal preconfigured
Date: 7 Jul 1997, 12:50:10

On Mon, 7 Jul 1997, Peter Gerwinski wrote:

> According to Jan-Jaap van der Heijden:
> > 
> > I have some preliminary stuff here to package GPC in an RPM. RPM is a
> > popular package manager in the Linux world. It makes upgrading a
> > binary distribution as easy as `rpm -U gpc-YYMMDD.i386.rpm'
> 
> Hmm ... now it is as easy as `tar xzf gpc-YYMMDD.i386-linux.tar.gz'.
> I am probably missing something.
> 

Yup, there are several other advantages of using a package manager over
plain .tgz files:

1) It will refuse to overwrite files during installation (unless forced).
2) It's able to properly uninstall a package.
3) When upgrading a package, it will delete unused files from a previous
   version that are no longer present in the new version.

There are other advantages, but this is not alt.rpm.advocacy ;-)

To keep track of all this, the package manager keeps a database of all
installed files and their dependencies. Of course, installing a .tgz in a
directory "contolled" by the package manager (i.e.: /usr) defeats this.

So, on any Linux system using a package manager (and these days, the only
major distribution *not* using one is Slackware) you should either install
GPC as a package, or install it outside the directories controlled by the
package manager (i.e. in /usr/local). For Debian, a package already
existed, and now I created one for the RPM based systems (at least RedHat
and Caldera)

Hope this helps,

JanJaap

---
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going
to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly
overhead.  -- RFC1925.

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