There's substantial evidence that RPM based distribution of Cygwin is feasible:
http://www.holonlinux.com/product/xonwin/index.html
Just in case you don't read Japanese, go directly to the FTP site:
ftp://xow.holonlinux.com/pub/XonWindows/
PETER!
(In case anyone was wondering, Peter was one of those hardy souls working on porting rpm 'back in the day' -- IIRC Peter was working on early 4.0.x versions...)
Yes, an RPM-based cygwin is feasible -- but the last time I looked, most of the competitors said something like: "First do (X) to install a basic cygwin system, and then use this tarball of rpm.exe, run rpm --initdb, then use rpm to install and/or update other parts of your system"
Where (X) is "unpack a tarball" or "piggyback off setup.exe and only install these three packages" or somesuch.
While *feasible,* that's not really *practical* as a "complete" distribution. Further, none of the schemes out there were capable of updating the cygwin dll itself -- because rpm.exe uses it. Nor could they update any other in-use files.
However, things may have changed over the years. I dunno, and I'm too lazy to check now. :-)
Personally, I'd welcome an official setup-installable package providing rpm. Here's why:
1) we'd probably see a number of folks -- those who don't want to permanently maintain a package, but want to provide it for people to use -- who'd choose to pack their contribution as rpms. (Preferably, these ad-hoc rpms would go somewhere like /usr/local or /opt/ or ANYWHERE except /usr and /usr/X11R6/ ).
2) as these numbers grow, folks might begin wondering how to (and provding code for) help setup.exe and rpm coexist -- updating each other's databases, maybe even linking setup.exe against librpm, etc etc. Of course, this requires that someone really really smart figure out the best way to create a "native" port of librpm -- that can still figure out where /var/cache/rpm and /etc and suchlike are really located...
On the other hand, that was Robert's idea behind providing the dpkg stuff in setup-installable form, and the above sequence didn't happen for deb...
--Chuck
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