[Scrollkeeper-devel] Re: relocatable package support

[Dan M. <d-...@uc...>]

A little bit of browsing around linux.redhat.rpm turned up
RPM_INSTALL_PREFIX as the variable which stores the prefix which will be
used.  I'm not sure if PREFIX is overwritten, but even if it is it should
be easy enough to store it as another variable name.  So, let's assume we
always have access to the default and relocated prefix.  (Here I'm
assuming other packaging systems are at least as good as RPM ;)

I think two main systems have been proposed:

1) Do not include the prefix in the OMF file until post-install time.  We
won't need the pre-install step. At post-install time, the
scrollkeeper-update-url script is run which modifies the OMF files and
inserts the prefix into the URLs.  In this case, relocatable and
non-relocatable packages are handled identically.

2) Include the prefix in the OMF file with scrollkeeper-preinstall, as we
do now.  For relocatable packages only, one adds an additional
post-install call to a script, scrollkeeper-update-url, which replaces the
unrelocated prefix with the relocated one.  In this case, unrelocated and
relocated packages are still handled pretty much the same except that one
(simple) extra line is added to the spec file.

I don't see any technical problems with either of these approaches.  (Does
anybody?)

So, I'm inclined to use whichever one is simplest for package authors to
understand and implement.  I think #1 is probably simpler even though it
introduces a second post-install script, since it gets rid of
scrollkeeper-preinstall and uses the same method for both relocatable and
non-relocatable packages.

We could allow people to choose either of the two, but I think that just
complicates things.

Dan