Re: [Xen-users] Debian Etch DomU on SUSE SLES 10.SP1 Dom0

[Steve Kemp <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri Jul 27, 2007 at 16:27:39 +0200, Henning Sprang wrote:

> Maybe I'm wrong, cpio seems to be only an intermediate tool to unpack rpms:
> http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/s1-rpm-miscellania-rpm2cpio.html

  Yes it looks simple enough:

  rpm2cpio foo.rpm | (cd /tmp/lah ; cpio --extract --make-directories \
  --no-absolute-filenames --preserve-modification-time) 2>&1

> When I think about it - why do you want to do it without rpm, anyway?

  My tool is .. non-standard .. and broken.

  (Sadly).

  The basic process goes:

   1.  Download each package which I've manually determined to be
      required to result in a working 'rpm' + 'yum' command.
      (There are about 50 packages.)

   2.  Unpack each one.  Currently this is a hack[*]

   3.  Once you've unpacked them you'll have a working system with
       yum + rpm, and from there you can bootstrap the yum + rpm
       database.

  The *only* place I currently use yum/rpm is in the second step.
  At the time I started writing I had a simple idea of how to
  unpack rpms.  This goes:

     for i in *.rpm; do 
        alien --to-tgz $i
        rm $i
     done
     for i in *.tgz; do
        tar -zxf $i
        rm $i
     done

  As you can see this is nasty, but surprisingly it all actually
 works.  There aren't many packages required to get RPM + Yum working
 just things like libssl, so having a static list of packages is
 not a big deal to maintain - I don't hard-wire the *version* of the
 packages so it is future-proof, unlike rpmstrap.

  With the rpm2cpio usage I can now drop the dependency upon alien
 and the script *should* be completely portable to any system which
 has a native rpm + rpm2cpio command :)

Steve
-- 
Debian GNU/Linux System Administration
http://www.debian-administration.org/


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