Packaging multiple rpms in one file

Question

Hi, Is it possible to paqckage multiple rpms into one file. I have got two bundles one of which requires that the other be installed. I would like to create a single installable out of them in such a way that this installer will first invoke pkg 1 and then install pkg 2. Is this possible? What about deb packages? Sorry if it a basic question. I have not worked with installers on Linux before. I have created Windows installers. There you can create two merge modules (.msm) and package them into a standalone installer (.msi) and specify the order of execution. I am looking for similar functionality on Linux.

EDIT: I think the question was not clear enough. Let me try to rephrase it. I have a bunch of runtime libraries which is currently shipped as a standalone installer. Another team develops products which use these libraries at runtime. I now want to provide the libraries to the product team in some form (sub-package) which they can include with their installer and configure their installer to install my sub-package first. Both packages should be available locally to the end user. They are not available on any repository and cannot be pulled down from the net at install time.

Answer 1

First : you don't have to repackage anything, especially not if your application uses some external libraries. You just have to mention in your recipe that your RPM (or DEB) depends on the other one. Both apt-get (for deb) and yum (for rpm) will check these dependencies and install them if needed.

See : http://rpm5.org/docs/api/dependencies.html (rpm) and http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Articles/How-to-make-deb-packages/ (deb)

(These were just the first ones I found, you can find better resources out there :p).

Answer 2

Try packaging them into a self extraction bash script. You won't have to modify or aggregate the libraries and rpms together. This should yield an executable file that can be included in another installation process. The last step of the extraction should be to call "rpm -i" with the rpm files as arguments.

Reference on building a self extracting bash script: http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005818