Sections What is RPMinator? What can it do? Why RPMinator? What about RPM? What is the plan? What should be done? What can I do? Screenshots? Download? SourceForge Project Page Contributors Sveinbjorn Thordarson Matthew Zuckman Related stuff MacRPM RPM for Darwin project RPM MacOS X port www.rpm.org Red Hat Linux Maximum RPM MacDeb Fink			1. What is RPMinator? RPMinator is a MacOS X application for opening and extracting files from and Red Hat Package Manager packages. The application requires MacOS X 10.2 or later. It is written in C for the Carbon Application Programming Interfaces and will not run on Classic versions of the MacOS. RPMinator is open-source software, and is distributed under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License. 2. What can it do? The most recent version of RPMinator, version 1.5, is capable of opening RPM packages, displaying a list of package contents, extracting files and displaying header data such as description, license, distribution, packaging, platform and so forth. You should get a clearer idea of its capabilities by viewing the screenshots below. Another advantage of installing RPMinator is that all RPM files viewed in MacOS X will be identified as such by Launch Services and get their own icon, indicating their nature in a more visual manner. 3. Why RPMinator? The primary developer of RPMinator, Sveinbjorn Thordarson, was also the maintainer of MacRPM, another SourceForge project. MacRPM was the MacOS Classic equivalent of RPMinator, although far more limited due to the non-UNIX nature of the old operating system. The arrival of MacOS X necessitated a new solution to RPM file handling on the Mac. RPMinator aims to be this solution. You may be wondering why the old name of MacRPM was not kept. Well...RPMinator sounds cooler and doesn't have the same Classic MacOS implications. 4. What about RPM? The actual RPM UNIX application (version 4.0.2 as of writing) has been ported to MacOS X by David Ressman and a package installer can be downloaded on his website. Instructions for compiling and setting up RPM by yourself can be found here. This begs the question: where does that leave RPMinator? It seems reasonable to presume that the RPM command line application is in many ways an incomplete solution to RPM file handling on the MacOS X platform, mostly due to the fact that it requires use of the...uh...command line, a phenomenon that many Mac users are uncomfortable with. Also, it is a cumbersome way to extract individual files from RPM packages, for those with simple needs in this respect. In its current state, RPMinator does not make use of the UNIX RPM app, but this will in all probability change in the forthcoming releases. While RPMinator is already far more than a simple graphical frontend, it is advantageous to make use of the finely crafted RPM libraries. We thus intend for RPMinator to complement and make use of, but not depend on, the UNIX RPM. 5. What is the plan? The plan is to develop RPMinator into a feature-rich standalone application and a full-fledged MacOS X-native graphical front-end for RPM. The features on the horizon include multiple simultaneous file extraction, package install and uninstall, extraction into folder hierarchies, display of dependencies, install scripts and more header data. Of course all this is in addition to the bugs that need to be ironed out of the latest version. 5. What should be done? The following bug fixes, features, changes and modifications are the current priorities in the gradual process of improving RPMinator: Dynamic memory allocation for more efficient memory usage Implement the ability to open multiple RPMs simultaneously Access to package dependencies, install scripts and other header data not yet accessible Remove RPMinator's dependency on the rpm2cpio command line application from RPM 4.0.2 Extraction of multiple selected items in Files list Add icons to the Files list indicating the file type within archive, based on MacOS X Icon/Launch Services. Implement contextual menus for Files list Show more info on individual files within package while browsing the Files list Implement features and optimizations based on the capabilities of the RPM command line application Add option to search through package contents for matching string Make application text fields selectable, copyable and pastable Make it possible to extract CPIO archive within RPM to user-designated location via Navigation Services Implement exporting of data on RPM packages to text files Get rid of the 1000 file package contents limit Fix problems that occur with some RPM packages when indexing CPIO archive 6. What can I do? Are you a fairly competent Mac or UNIX programmer? If so, your help would be MOST appreciated. The primary developer of RPMinator, Sveinbjorn Thordarson, is rather new to UNIX programming and, like everyone else, relatively new to MacOS X programming. Thus any help, pointers, bug fixes or any other form of contribution is most certainly welcome. If you want to contribute then by all means get in touch. 7. Screenshots Click on the links below to see various components of the current version of RPMinator: Open RPM package listing files it contains. Open RPM package showing header info. Open RPM package showing description and summary. RPMinator Preferences window RPMinator application Icon RPM package Icon CPIO archive Icon 8. Download You can download RPMinator from the SourceForge server by clicking the appropriate link below. Versions prior to 1.5 require StuffIt Expander to be decompressed while more recent releases are Gunzipped Tar archives. Version 1.5 beta 1 [Changes] RPMinator 1.5 beta 1 Application RPMinator 1.5 beta 1 source code (Project Builder project) Version 1.0 RPMinator 1.0 application RPMinator 1.0 source code (Project Builder project) ©2002-2003 Sveinbjorn Thordarson