Question regarding RPM packaging of interactive software.

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

>>>>> "JC" == Jon Ciesla <limb at jcomserv.net> writes:

JC> I can't recall at the moment where this stems from, but the
JC> rationale, as I recall, was that we can never be sure if the
JC> database is available at RPM install/upgrade time.

It's pretty simple.  Creating databases isn't generally something that
an rpm can do on its own; for mysql, at least, rpm certainly won't have
any way at all to get at local administrative password.  And of course
databases can be on remote machines, so such packages rarely have
dependencies on the actual database server anyway (just the client
libraries) and certainly no way to figure out where the remote server is
or how to access it.

Now, sqlite would be a different matter.  It would still be terribly
antisocial for a package to wipe out existing data on an upgrade, but
creating and managing sqlite databases is something that could be done
by the package (although I'd still think that's better left for
runtime).

 - J<