FreeBSD hacker 101

[Mike Meyer]

On Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:24:36 -0800 (PST) KAYVEN  RIESE <kayve at sfsu.edu> wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Jan 2008, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> 
> > KAYVEN  RIESE <kayve at sfsu.edu> writes:
> >> i don't recognize that as what i said, but i was trying to make the
> >> point that BSD DOESn't use rpm compression, and that was a point i
> >> was trying to make in terms of comparison/contrast
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean by "rpm compression", since rpm is not a
> > compression algorithm but a set of tools and a file format (based on
> > gzipped cpio archives) used by those tools.
> 
> gzip is compression.  okay it is an archiver.  

Right the first time. gzip has no ability to deal with an archive as
anything but a byte stream.

> all i know is that
> standard old boys unix uses *.tgz which is a mix of compression
> and archiving with tar.  i have only encountered rpm sporatically
> because i have not done a lot of linux, but i know that when you
> enounter a package to be installed it seemed to me *.rpm is an
> alternative to *.tgz

.tgz (and the later .tbz variant) is the dominant format for
platform-independent archives on Unix-like systems, so I'd expect
anyone who claims to be competent in that space to be able to deal
with them. (FreeBSD's pkg* tools extends it in a backwards-compatible
manner by adding "magic" files, but the resulting tarballs work fine
on other systems).

.rpm is a package format, and comes with a tool set for using it. Most
(all?) GNU/Linux systems come with tools for dealing with it, but they
all also come with tools for dealing with .tgz. Some GNU/Linux distros
use .rpm to distribute their software, but not all do. I don't think
any Unix systems have adopted it; most of them have packaging systems
that predate .rpm, and they're all different. Different package
formats for vendor software isn't a GNU/Linux vs. FreeBSD or Unix
thing, it's a fact of line in a multi-platform Unix environment.

       <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.