From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2004-08-23T08:06:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Package requests for the prelim. Ruby Production Archive

On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 06:55:42AM +0900, James Britt wrote:
> Ah.  I thought the default paths, as presented by the installer, were 
> complete paths.  So I kept entering complete paths.  The prompts gave no 
> indication that my earlier paths would be reused to build the other paths.

I'll change the messages; if it's bitten you it could bite more people :-)

> >  As of now, it is probably better to just install into the normal
> >  $prefix, since rpa-base provides enough guarantees to make sure it
> >  won't end up cluttered with half-installed RPA ports.
> 
> Are you *sure*? I've had enough issues with 
> installing/uninstalling/reinstalling assorted versions of the 1-click 
> package.  I don't want any overlap between this and my main ruby 
> installation.

I'm fairly sure, since:
(1) rpa-base will not overwrite the files it doesn't "own" (i.e. not
   managed by it), unless you explicitly indicate that it's fine with
   --force (when rpa-base "owns" a file, this means it will remove it on
   uninstall *unless* it detects somebody else has modified it).
(2) (de)installs are atomic transactions: either the package is installed
   cleanly (which implies passing its associated unit tests in many
   cases) or the (partially) unpacked package is removed completely.

Of course, there could be bugs in (2), but I've tested it heavily (must
have run over 10**6 transactions by now :-) and it is AFAIK pretty solid.
I have yet to verify if it's able to survive OS crashes (it is in
theory), but it's hard to do that sort of tests... I've already
verified it's able to survive Ruby crashes.

Take a look at 
http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?Rpa_Base_In_Action/Robust_Transactions
for an interesting example.

> I'll go see if I can get this to play well on my laptop.

Please tell me if you have any problem installing/using it, bug reports
are *very* welcome :-)

The good thing about having rpa-base self-install is that if that works,
it's very likely that it will work for other packages too :)

-- 
Running Debian GNU/Linux Sid (unstable)
batsman dot geo at yahoo dot com