RFR: more FC4 Requests

[Panu Matilainen]

On Sat, 2004-11-20 at 21:23 -0500, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> Panu Matilainen wrote:
> 
> >On Sat, 2004-11-20 at 19:36 -0500, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> >  
> >
> >
> >Sure, people love and use it (for example the Lua-interface is a killer
> >feature which yum currently lacks) but it's starting to seem like a dead
> >end to me.
> >
> 
> So how should lua be made available to yum?
> 
> Current implementation of lua in rpm is through %{lua: ...} macro 
> constructs,
> grotesque mainly because of the necessity to preserver a "stable" and 
> constant
> rpm-python interface. E.g. there is no way to simply expand a macro, one 
> has to
> go through the baggage of hdr.sprintf() where rpmExpand() to invoke lua 
> happens
> as side effect. That's obscure enough to pass for "stable", sigh.
> 

I'm not talking about making Lua available to yum, I'm talking about the
mechanism which is *the* killer feature of apt-rpm, not the language
itself. I'd take python over lua any day, it's just that Lua is easier
and smaller to embed compared to python. In yum's case Lua doesn't make
any sense, it's just a matter of allowing "external" python scripts to
affect yum's functionality at certain predefined points. That's what
apt's lua-interface is all about, and I know something like that is
being planned for yum (IIRC under the name "xtriggers" or somesuch)

> Easy enough to rip several layers off the above, what stops is no need 
> to do so yet.
> 
> Hum a few notes about what you'ld like to see lua used for in yum, 
> please. I think
> lua has definite and positive benefits for rpm packaging, becuase for 
> the first time
> rpmlib can run scripts without the baggage of scriptlet dependencies. 
> Lots of dependencies
> would (will imho)  simply melt away if lua rather than shell were used 
> for the 20 or so
> common operations performed by package scriptlets.

Again, Lua has zero to do with this, it's all about adding similar
customization possiblity to yum that's available in apt-rpm currently.

	- Panu -