RPM roadmapping

[Peter Jones]

seth vidal wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-07-29 at 00:20 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> User (as opposed to administrator) installs in their home directories. I 
>> could run say Mozilla Firefox extracted from a tarball but having a 
>> similar capability in RPM itself would be nice.
>>
>> RPM should also recognize and use library files I have installed through 
>> other means.
> 
> -ENOTSANE
> 
> It does not make sense to have rpm chase down paths which may or may not
> be available at any given time. Let alone be able to maintain and verify
> them. (think security updates)

It's worse than that.  If you look carefully at his example, firefox, 
you'll notice this:

$ eu-readelf -d /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.3/firefox-bin | grep RPATH
   RPATH             Library rpath: [/usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.3]

Which means if you want it installed in a home directory, you have to 
modify all the binaries to look in a different path than they normally 
would -- rpath would need to point at something like 
~pjones/usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.3 .

If we're want to support something like this, the way to do it would be 
something like per-user unionfs namespaces.  We'd still need some rpm 
help (it'd need to remap file ownership during installation, at the very 
least), but mostly the work isn't within rpm's scope.

-- 
   Peter