On 03/10/2003 at 00:20:45(-0700), C. Brewer used 1.0K just to say:
> True, there were solid suggestions in the bug, but IIRC most of them
> revolved around rpm/rpm2cpio, negating the need for rpm2tgz in the first
> place.

The reason I opened that bug in the first place, is because I didn't want to
compile rpm to install icc on a friend's computer. So even though rpm/rpm2cpio
negates the need for rpm2tgz, there is a solid reason why we do need a quick,
easy, small solution for uncompressing rpms.

1. feature(gzip + bzip2 + rpmoffset) == feature(rpm2cpio)

2. size(gzip + bzip2 + rpmoffset) <<<<<< size(rpm2cpio) == size(rpm)

> Maybe I ( or someone with the time) will work out the hitch in
> rpm2tgz.

What hitch? We've alrady worked around that hitch. However if you read the bug
correctly -- there was a suggestion for fixing the rpm2tgz package itself, but
Mr.Tse decided to simply fix the rpm.eclass. Which IMHO is a solution good
enough as we mostly need to uncompress RPMs in ebuilds.

> IMHO its bad enough needing to install rpms in the first place,
> without adding the rpm program as well. Just a thought:)

It is *not* a bad idea, and here is why:

First of all, Gentoo does not "install" rpms. Gentoo doesn't care about
dependency information in the rpm, nor does it need to update some freaky
database that rpm uses. It only needs the files. So in Gentoo terms -- the RPM
package is just a freaky tarball. Why would I need the rpm package to
uncompress that freaky tarball if I can go without it?

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