Installing WordPerfect (was Re:RPM compatability)

Paul King sciguy-Ja3L+HSX0kI at public.gmane.org
Tue Feb 5 11:31:14 UTC 2008


For what it is worth, I found the intended rpm source for this version,
and it came from a CD I had for the Caldera Network Desktop version 1.0
that accompanied the WP distro. I still need to look for some other
sources for header files.

And the good news is, it came in a tarball. Most rpm sources I have seen
came in the same version of rpm that the source comes in. You would need
the same version of rpm to unpack it as the one you wanted to compile!
Talk about a chicken-and-egg problem! I would need a working rpm program
of the same version to unpack it, yet if I had a working version, I
wouldn't need to unpack it. But I would have had to unpack it, because I
wouldn't have had a working version. 

Apart from that I don't understand why rpm isn't backwards-compatible
like most other archiving/compression formats I know about. The
new-as-tomorrow versions of GNU tar and gzip I have on Ubuntu seemed to
have no problem untarring these sources, which by now are about 11 years
old. I have also never had versioning problems with ZIP, RAR, ARJ, or
anything else I have tried. For all of its swiss army knife features, I
have found rpm the most frustrating format to work with, especially when
doing a simple unpacking of files into an arbitrary directory.

Paul King


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