I just fell into the rpm dependency well - is there anyway out?

[James Antill]

On Sun, 2010-06-06 at 17:29 +0000, John Burrell wrote:
> I am trying to convert a non-rpm based machine to an rpm based one.

 As others have said, this is a bad idea. It's like trying to convert an
Ubuntu system into a Fedora ... they just aren't the same.

 If you only have this one machine, and you need to reinstall it but
keep all the data that's on it ... your best bet is probably to do
something like:

1. Boot into a rescue CD.

2. mkdir /old-machine; mv /* /old-machine

3. Reboot and reinstall (but make sure you tell it not to format the
disk).

4. Post install, copy the things you need from /old-machine to configure
the new one.

> I installed rpm-4.8.0 from source and then built rpm-4.8.0-1.i386.rpm
> and then tried to install it.

 The problem is you need to install a lot of the core packages at once,
as they'll require each other. In theory if you setup yum, you could do
something like:

yum install /bin/* /sbin/* /usr/bin/* /usr/bins/*

...but again, depending on what the original distribution looks like you
are going to have a mix of old bits from the old OS which may interact
badly with your new one.