[Gllug] Installing Linux software (Part II)

[Paul Nasrat]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 03:57:15PM -0000, Paul Brazier wrote:
> > It just reinforces my opinion that packages should not be created by
> > third parties. They just cause more problems than they solve. If all
> > your packages come from a single vendor (e.g., Red Hat, Mandrake,
> > Debian, etc.) then you're fine. Otherwise, you're just asking for
> > trouble. The excpetion to this would be if they installed into their
> > own directoy in /opt, and had no dependencies other than on packages
> > supplied by the same vendor. See CorelDRAW 9 for an example of how
> > not to do it...
> 
> Is there any mileage in creating your own personalised rpms?

Yup - it's really usefull (you can even munge them into the installer as
well...)

> Does anyone do this & is it tricky?

It's not hard for simple stuff:

http://www.rpm.org/
http://www.rpm.org/RPM-HOWTO/
http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/howtos/mdk-rpm/

> I was thinking if you need an application (or version) that isn't
> available for your distro or even only from source and you don't want to
> mess up your rpm database.

It's usefull for adding extra options - eg unstripped with debugging
for some tempramental software you are fixing, more secure out of the
box (eg change inetd.conf in the rpm...).  It's not that hard, if you
are updating you can usually pull in the older spec file, grab the new
source, add additional patches and build.  

Paul

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