Installing WordPerfect (was Re:RPM compatability)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 06:31:14AM -0500, Paul King wrote:
> 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.

Ehm, bad thinking on redhat's part?  Wouldn't be the first dumb thing
they decided on over the years.  They have done lots of good things, and
a few rather dumb things.  rpm development while certainly improving rpm
also caused a lot of headaches when they made things incompatible.

Debian seems to have a policy that if you want to add something to the
package format, you first have to add it to the tools, then wait for a
complete release cycle so that the current stable release supports the
feature before you are allowed to actually start using it in new
packages since you have to ensure stable systems can upgrade to the new
packages.  And they make sure it still supports old package formats at
the same time.

--
Len Sorensen
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