[Rpm-maint] Assorted changes in my rpm branch

[Panu Matilainen]

On Thu, 14 Dec 2006, James Bowes wrote:

> Paul Nasrat wrote:
>>>> It's quite possible that there actually is a good reason to have a lot of 
>>>> this stuff in rpm, but I haven't heard it yet. If there are some bits 
>>>> that would be useful to rpm.org at large, I'd be happy to massage the 
>>>> code to make it easier to grab them.
>>> The only bit that I would have left in is lua support, and this is only
>>> because it allows working around one annoying bug.  In openSUSE 10.2,
>>> lua is used to remove the /usr/lib/X11 and /usr/include/X11 symlinks, so
>>> that the fun "rpm can't replace a symlink with a directory" bug does not
>>> hit.  Obviously a better solution would be to fix the bug, but is fixed
>>> it for now.
>> 
>> I think lua is discreet enough to be of value moving forward, I think
>> the rpmHook mechanism Gustavo introduced to plumb it in is also a really
>> good framework to look at dealing with some of the current issues I've
>> been facing and want to deal with.
>> 
>> We're also using lua, although that could be reduced to a library/binary
>> call right now for selinux policy stuff.
>
> If both openSUSE and Fedora are using lua, I'd say that's reason enough to 
> keep it, eh?
>
> I guess what confused me is that lua seems so uncharacteristic of what you'd 
> use on linux.

Indeed. Trust me, you're not the only one feeling that way :) The point of 
Lua in rpm isn't really about Lua the language, it's about having a small 
but relatively powerful script engine embedded within rpm. Allows you to 
do plenty of things without requiring a functioning /bin/sh on the system 
for example, which should make bootstrapping the package set on 
installation easier etc.

> So maybe instead of yanking it, the idea could be to do up some docs or 
> examples of how you can use it effectively and correctly in macros?

+10

 	- Panu -