you really don't get it. whoever writes the code MAKES THE RULES.
someone made an RPM out of some code, and he had hacked on was just
using what was the most practical to him.
If you can't make the effort *once* to make sure you have a way to
unpack an archive in a widely used format like RPM, or if you have a
political problem with RedHat, it's *your* problem, not anyone else's.
RPMs are just another file-pack format with extensions for package
meta-information. You can easily ignore these and extract the files
out of the archive.
www.rpm.org [1] has a link to an rpm2cpio perl script [2] (that I wrote
when confronted with exactly this problem, incidentally).
It takes 30 seconds to download it, 10 seconds to type "rpm2cpio
whatever.rpm > blah.cpio", and 1 minute to read the cpio manpage and
figure out that "cpio -d -i" is the extracting command. I'm sure all
the whining in this thread has taken much longer than that.
If you want to be really helpful, you could go download the GNU cpio
sources, and add code so it handles RPMs directly, ignoring all extra
packaging info. (and if you really feel nice that day, might as well do
.deb too, assuming they're also cpio-based).
this is my last message on this thread.
[1] http://www.rpm.org
[2] http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/espel/rpm2cpio
-- Roger Espel Llima, espel@llaic.u-clermont1.fr http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/espel/index.html- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/