On 07/25/2011 07:26 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: [snip]
My condition in that case was that you couldn't count on the RPM to work anyway once the distribution changes. So you'll likely be repeating that extra effort anyway.
Not sure what you mean with "once the distribution changes" but within a major CentOS/RHEL version (e.g. 5 or 6) there is a stable ABI so an update to the distro should not introduce issues. In my experience apps deployed on RHEL 5.1 work equally on 5.7. If they work crappy, hire better developers :)
And of course your next install may be on a non-RPM based system, making any rpm-packaging effort moot.
So do people in the Windows world decide to *not* build msi packages because their PHB might decide to replace all Windows with RHEL/CentOS? I have never seen that (the not building msi packages that is). And neither the reverse. I build versioned packages so (amongst other things) I can create a controlled and predictable environment. Are you going to install from source on thousands of servers or do you push *one* tested rpm? I know what I will be doing. Anything else just does not make sense to me.
Regards, Patrick