WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-users

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

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/


_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users