requires(post) on coreutils

[Panu Matilainen]

On Thu, 20 Nov 2008, Jesse Keating wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 14:49 -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
>>
>> But there's clearly a default, which is shell script.  And in
>> particular bash.  In any case do we really want to encourage people
>> writing their %post scripts in lua or whatever random language they
>> like?  I don't think we do.  That will fragment the community of
>> people who can modify a package.
>
> Actually yes, lua would be a good forced default, since rpm contains an
> internal lua interpreter and would need no external deps to process the
> script.  Of course, regardless of what /language/ the script is written
> in, the script could call upon things that are both "core os" utilities,
> as well as "applications".

Yup... and with internal Lua, the need for those core os utilities is much 
reduced as you can do lots of things directly from Lua, without forking a 
single extra process. This is particularly useful for things that happen 
very early in the transaction where a shell might not be even installed 
yet. Another, perhaps not so obvious advantage of Lua scriptlets is that 
syntax errors are caught at build time.

Lua in rpm has been pretty much undocumented and as such largely 
misunderstood and dismissed with "well I'm not interested in some oddball 
niche programming language." It's not about Lua the language, it's about 
the possibilities that having a fairly powerful programming language 
embedded in rpm opens up, things that would be completely impossible 
otherwise. Beginnings of documentation can be now found here: 
http://rpm.org/wiki/PackagerDocs/RpmLua

Enough Lua rant for this morning,

 	- Panu -