ten billion butterfly sneezes

I’m still no great shakes as a Ruby coder, but I’m continually amazed at how much can be accomplished with a very few lines of code.

As an example, I mentioned that I’ve been buiding a lot of Solaris packages and Linux binary RPMS lately. One thing I miss on Linux is an equivalent to Solaris’ pkgproto command, which is used like this:

find /path/to/binaries | pkgproto > prototype , or also

pkgproto path ... > prototype

This is how Solaris handles the equivalent of the %files section of a RPM spec file. One thing to like about pkgproto is that it captures owner, group and permissions of each file. Linux supports an
%attr(owner,group,perms) name-of_file

construct; however, Linux provides no tool to directly generate this. In a very few lines of Ruby, I was able to implement a pkgproto equivalent that produces output with each line looking like this:

file_type %attr(uid,gid,perms) filename

This can then be read into the RPM %files section (after stripping the first field). I prefer to use a separate file, combined with the %files -f in the RPM spec file. I’ll discuss how I use that first field in a subsequent installment.

I love that Ruby; a tool to build tools.

-k-

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