RPM newbie
 

Hello All,

I am a newbie to the Linux flavors and I am attempting to create an installer using RPM and was hoping someone might be able to answer a questions since I have run into very limited documentation on the mechanism.

I have created an *.rpm file containing my application but at install time I was wonder if there was a way of exluding certain files via the CLI(similar to "tar --exclude=")

Any help you can proved would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,
-Jim

well, it depends of the reason of excluding the files.

If it's because there can be another package containing them you can check in your .spec file if some rpm is installed on the system.
You can require any program.

For any other reason, I'm not sure, but creating more than one rpm package, or running a program in the %pre or %post part of the spec file could help the user choosing the packages to install.

check
http://www.rpm.org/RPM-HOWTO/
or
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RpmHowTo

if the rpm is for mandrake

hope this helps.

RPM newbie
 

Hello aizkorri,

Thank you for your reply and web site pointers. Basically I am trying to create a package (single RPM) that has two features or components. Meaning I have 4 files that I treat as one feature and 2 other files that I treat as a separate feature. I would like to either be able to state explictly via the RPM CLI which file to install or even better which files to exclude. Currently I have 2 rpms, one for each feature but in that case I duplicated my support issues. Plus all these files are really one product, and just a couple of them exist to only add additional functionality to the whole.

Best Regards,
-Jim

Hi,
well, as fas as I know (not too much :)), there's not any option in the RPM CLI for choosing the files to install.

you could (just a suggestion):
Make a basic package that has a script in
%post(whatever is here will be executed after installation)
that tells the user that there's another feature if you install whatever.rpm

Then create a second package, that requires the first one, only with the other two files.

There should be a better option but nothing else comes to my mind.

Good luck.