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Porting swup to Redhat 7.3
This article is outdated. Swup is an rpm-based alternative to Debian’s apt, used in the Trustix Secure Linux distribution. I haven’t followed what TSL is up to, but chances are that swup is still in use today. However, there are more widely used options for rpm-based distributions, like apt-rpm or yum. Furthermore, the swup Sourceforge project set up by the TSL developers way back when seems to have abandoned a few years ago.
The swup (software updater) package is roughly equivalent to Debian’s apt (advanced packaging tool). Swup allows for automatic software updates, while satisfying package dependencies and verifying the integrity of the packages and meta-information by means of a cryptographic signature. Since I’m primarily using RedHat 7.3 and Trustix, it makes more sense to port swup to RedHat than to port apt to both distributions.
Swup is written in Python and ports very easily. The related rdfgen package that creates the RDF repositories requires but a short patch to address some intrinsic capabilities of RPM 4.0.4 that ships with Redhat 7.3.
Running swup is trivial ("swup --upgrade") and the rest of the article describes how to set up a repository for RedHat. The repository is a web or ftp archive of package files and meta-information. While Trustix uses the i586 architecture for all architecture-dependent packages, RedHat uses i386/i586/i686/athlon for the actual kernel packages and i386/i686 for a few select application packages. Unless all RedHat boxes using a repository share the same architecture, it’s probably best to create separate meta-information for each architecture. The specifics are a matter of individual preference, but here is a sample layout that works for me:
(read more below the fold)
Click to read MORE...Posted by markus on Thursday, September 18, 2003
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