Actually with a bit of work RPM's can indeed be opened with common *NIX
tools. Once you strip the header off an RPM file the actual archive is a
gzipped cpio file. You do need to know how an RPM structure is built so you
can strip the header from the archive but it can be done.

so to play with an RPM file you would use dump, tail, gzip and cpio. There
is also a tool that is called rpmarchive that extracts the archive without
the use of dump and tail, or for that matter the knowledge of the RPM
format.

Cheers,

Davidm

-----Original Message-----
From: der.hans [mailto:PLUGd@lufthans.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 12:59 AM
To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: Rant


Am 08. Oct, 2001 schwätzte Nathan England so:

> stop releasing tarballs or source.  Instead only releasing rpm, and
> srpm.  Which really screws me.  I don't pay a whole lot of attention to
> debian, but I haven't been seeing as much debian packaging either.  

You can install an SRPM. One of the ingredients to such things is supposed
to be a pristine tarball as gleaned from the author/maintainer of the
upstream package. Same as for source debs.

debs can be opened with normal *NIX commands. I think ar and a couple of
other things are all that's needed. I recently saw a thread about wanting to
move to something else, but it was brought up that ar is a common tool and
the debian socail contract requires the ability to open debian packages with
normal utils.

Can RPMs be opened with common *NIX tools as well?

ciao,

der.hans
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