Re: package system: questions, suggestions, alien

On Wed, 22 May 2002 00:23:56 +0300, Ville =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Skytt=E4?= said: IBM's AIX also has the concept of an 'ifreq' - *IF* another package is is installed, it must be at level X.Y.Z or later for the current package to install - but if the package is not installed at all, that's OK too. Actual 'installp' prereq file I used to package EXHM for AIX: *prereq fw_tk.rte.bin 8.3.2.0 *prereq fw_metamail.rte 2.7.0.0 *prereq fw_nmh.rte 1.0.4.0 *ifreq fw_img.rte 1.2.3.0 *ifreq fw_netscape_remote.rte 1.2.0.0 *ifreq fw_pgp2.rte 2.6.2.0 *ifreq fw_pgp6.rte 6.5.8.0 *ifreq fw_procmail.rte 3.14.0.0 Meaning that you WILL NOT get it to install unless Tk, metamail, and nhm are at the specified level (and the tk package then pre-reqs tcl itself), and if Img, netscape_remote, pgp2, pgp6, or procmail are installed, they have to be at that level or later. And they support "group prerequisites" too, which is mind-bogglingly useful for versioning to fit an operating system release. From 'lsof': *prereq bos.rte v=4 r=3 m=2 *prereq fw_lsof.aix432.rte 4.54.0.0 } *prereq bos.rte v=4 r=3 m=3 *prereq fw_lsof.aix433.rte 4.54.0.0 } *prereq bos.rte 5.0.0.0 *prereq fw_lsof.aix5.rte 4.54.0.0 } } Meaning: to install, more than zero of the sub-groups must be satisfied. The first subgroup requires more than 1 of (bos.rte at *exactly* 4.3.2 and the lsof.aix432 binary), and similarly for the other two. The IBM compiler runtime libs for C++ do an insane amount of this - they'll version on the opsys level, say stuff like "at least 2 of the following 4 (and 3 of the choices are *ifreq choices)", etc etc.... Of course, IBM AIX support stole the *ifreq stuff from the old MVS 'SMP4' (right down to the '*' ;) so this is stuff they've been doing since OS/360 literally 38 years ago now. -- Valdis Kletnieks Computer Systems Senior Engineer Virginia Tech