[cs615asa] HW2 Questions

[Jan Schaumann]

John Scire <jscire at stevens.edu> wrote:

> 1) For the node.js dependency, can we use the rpm package or should we  
> include the source in our rpm package and put steps to build that along  
> with statsd in the spec file?

You would not include Node.JS in your package.  Instead, you tell your
package that it requires Node.JS (possibly of a certain version number),
and let the package manager figure out the rest.

> 2) I noticed that the dependencies for node.js differ slightly from the  
> rpm listing and the main github website.  If we are using the rpm  
> package, should we include a super-set of the dependencies and include  
> all from both in our spec file?

You should specify the dependencies that are sufficient for statsd to
run.  If a user has other versions installed, then that is fine so long
as they meet your requirements.

> 3) After adding the dependencies and coming time to install the statsd  
> rpm package on a clean machine, is it okay if it throws an error about a  
> missing dependency, to which then the user must install to continue, or  
> should it pull the dependency and install that automatically before  
> continuing?

Your RPM would fail to install if the dependencies are not met.  It is
up to the user or the package manager to sort them out.  That is, if you
run

rpm -i your-statsd.rpm

and not all dependencies are present, then that will fail.  If you run

rpm -i dependency1.rpm dependency2.rpm your-statsd.rpm

then it would succeed.  Likewise, if your RPM was installed in a yum
repository in use by the system, and that yum repository has all the
RPMS of all the dependencies, then running

yum install your-statsd

would also work.


Hope this helps,
-Jan