[lug] February 14th talk?

[Rob Nagler]

> Package systems are designed to save you from the dependency mess. They do
> until you subvert them by installing from tarballs (or by telling the
> package system to ignore dependencies).

One caveat: we use RPMs to deliver internal configuration.  You need
to use --force or it won't work.  We have two or more layers of
configuration (system, host, subsystem).  The different layers overlap
files intentionally with each other and the standard RPMs on the
system.

BTW, we put a wrapper around rpm for building and installing.  This
makes for easy installs, because we don't have to remember lots of
common details.  For example, all of our builds come from cvs, so we
added an abstraction to the rpm spec files for pulling out files
from cvs.  The source for the wrapper is downloadable under LGPL.
Go to http://petshop.bivio.biz/src?s=Bivio::Util::Release to see a
pretty-printed version which contains links to the our site and the
source. 

Rob