Re: Installers that handle more than just modules and scripts?

[JavaFan]

Maybe you're using the wrong tool? Seems like you want to reinvent what your OS native package manager is already doing. Why not reuse what's already there?

[jhourcle]

I would if I were running it in a homogeneous environment, but it's being distributed to 4 sites now, running a mix of MacOS, Solaris and two linux flavors. I'm in the process of updating my installers because we're looking to add another 3-5 sites into the mix.

[JavaFan]

Quoting rpm5.org:

Traditionally, RPM is a core component of many Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, CentOS, Mandriva Linux, and many others. But RPM is also used for software packaging on many other Unix operating systems like FreeBSD, Sun OpenSolaris, IBM AIX and Apple Mac OS X through the cross-platform Unix software distribution OpenPKG. Additionally, the RPM archive format is an official part of the Linux Standard Base (LSB).

Quoting netbsd.org:

Table 1. Platforms supported by pkgsrc:

Platform 	   Date Support Added
NetBSD 	           Aug 1997
Solaris 	   Mar 1999
Linux 	           Jun 1999
Darwin (Mac OS X)  Oct 2001
FreeBSD 	   Nov 2002
OpenBSD 	   Nov 2002
IRIX 	           Dec 2002
BSD/OS 	           Dec 2003
AIX 	           Dec 2003
Interix  	   Mar 2004
DragonFlyBSD 	   Oct 2004
OSF/1 	           Nov 2004
HP-UX 	           Apr 2007
QNX 	           Oct 2007
Haiku 	           Sep 2010

That's with just one minute of researching package systems.

[jhourcle]

I appreciate your 60 seconds of research, because your original response wouldn't have led me in the direction of RPM. You seemed to be suggesting 'your OS native package manager', which for me is MacOS Installer (likely to be changed in the near future, as the death of the Xserve gives us little hope on the continued viability of MacOS Server)

I'm also not particularly a fan of the ham-fistedness of most package managers -- yum, darwinports, fink and others just love to install alternate versions of perl and update every last module to the latest version, which has shot me in the foot a few times. It's also possible that I'll need to support Windows in the future, so RPM still doesn't look to be the ideal situation, only a stopgap.