Re: rh-rpm] RE: rpm -ba to build does not work ???

[R P Herrold <herrold owlriver com>]

On Fri, 2003-08-29 at 12:46, lrtaylor@micron.com wrote:

> Come on, Seth.  Be nice.  When even the official RPM site points you
> to out of date material as practically the standard reference on RPM
> and it (Maximum RPM) tells you to do things differently than they've
> been done for the last few years, you can't be too harsh on someone
> who doesn't know why the commands in the book (or whatever reference
> they looked at) don't work. 

"the official RPM site points you  to out of date material as 
practically the standard reference"   When in the workd are 
you referring to???  

In the section addressing the book, the http://www.rpm.org/ site says:
	...  The Maximum RPM book covers everything from 
	general RPM usage to building your own RPMs to programming 
	with rpmlib. While not keyed to the latest versions, the 
	underlying concepts and examples remain substantially 
	unchanged.

The phrase 'not keyed to the latest versions' scarcely implies
"practically the standard"  to me.  The man page, or the
sources come to mind as better, in a free software world.

One cannot recall old books when things change any more than
you can expect a user to read the man page, google out the
answer, or look through a website; That same site of course
has:
    http://www.rpm.org/hintskinks/rpmbuild/
two clicks from the top page, in addition to the repeats on 
the mailing list.

The source for the book, Maximum RPM, is in CVS, and available
as a freestanding srpm.  Feel free to annotate your
corrections or commentary {duly marked so as to be
distinguishable from Ed Bailey's fine work}, and send them
along.  I'll find space for them on the site.  Getting people
to read that is the challenge.

Or instead of carping about the site, provide an alternative;  
participate in the website revision mailing list, mentioned on
the mailing list page:
>     rpm-ed list
> The rpm-ed list is for discussion of EDITORIAL matters ONLY 
> related to the http://www.rpm.org website. NO technical 
> answers on RPM usage will be offered there.

And the source files driving the site are freely readable and 
indexed, and unified diffs on a given 'body.txt' in the 
directory tree are welcome.

New contributors are welcome.  I fielded a OT technical
question on building rpm from sources on HP-UX 11 just today.  
[I offered hope and referred the person asking back to this
list.]

-- Russ Herrold, Editor, rpm site.