Quoting Manoj Srivastava srivasta@debian.org:
On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:33:51 +0530, Devdas Bhagat devdas-B/gC27/pXbteH41UXmfQsti2O/JbrIOy@public.gmane.org said:
On 28/02/07 10:05 -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
snip>
chmod, ar and tar. rpm's need a special tool. Now, why is this important at all? Well, think of a classified environment, where you do not want to rely on the packaged tool to help you with forensics; but you have a trusted solaris box.
A unix system without cpio? RPM is essentially cpio with a specified header format.
Actually, no: it is a modified cpio. The implementation ispretty close, but it has some behaviors which are more to RPM's liking. If you take a plain old cpio from Solaris/Aix/HPUX et al you'll find that you can't really inspect/create rpm files.
inspect and extract yes, create not too easily..
Which is why we have rpm2cpio package, it converts the rpm tostandard cpio format. If it was a plain old cpio, you would not need rpm2cpio.
i was under a similar impression, but it ain't true.. see http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/drafts/rpm-guide-en/ch-extra-packaging-tools.h... for an example of shell and perl based rpm2cpio to remove the headers and other packaging information.
- dhawal