[Fedora-packaging] create a wrapper installer

[Garrett Holmstrom]

On 5/5/2010 18:04, MGandra at diskeeper.com wrote:
> I have an rpm package for installation. Before I install I should
> display the License Agreement and when the user accepts it then I should
> install the package. I know we don’t have user interaction in rpm, what
> I am looking at is how to create an wrapper so that I can present this
> license agreement and then ask the user to agree it and if he says “Yes”
> or “y” I can continue to install.
>
> I have seen programs like“jdk-6u18-linux-i586-rpm.bin”  and other which are able to do this.  We will just change the file to exectable and then run it.

We've found this problematic in the past at my workplace.  In 
particular, it makes the product very difficult to automatically install 
or update since customers never get their hands on the actual binary 
RPMs.  This forces sysadmins to log into every machine individually 
every time they want to install or update the program just so the 
installer can display some license agreement they've already read and 
agreed to.  This is especially important to corporate customers who 
don't care to spend their time doing this for a network of hundreds of 
machines.  If you insist on using a wrapper, please make it possible to 
extract the binary RPM so customers can add it to their private package 
management systems and avoid this mess.

As a simple alternative, I suggest sending customers to a web page with 
the license agreement that they can accept before actually downloading 
product RPMs.  This makes it easier both for packagers like yourself as 
well as for customers who want to roll out products to a number of 
computers.  Sun, Oracle, and VMware all do this sort of thing with many 
of their products since there's no point in making somebody accept the 
same license agreement hundreds of times.