OT: Gentoo, Red Hat, etc. (was Re: [Mimedefang] Latest MIME-Tools)

[Kelson Vibber]

At 03:48 PM 3/22/2004, Les Mikesell wrote:
>There are two approaches that work.  One is to keep locally compiled 
>things under /usr/local which is often their default, and adjust your PATH 
>to use them instead of the system version when desired.

I used to do this.  Actually, I still do this on servers with sendmail, 
apache, and php.  Stow helps a little, but it's still pain to deal with, 
especially when you've replaced a system package or you need to uninstall 
or upgrade something.

>The other is write a spec file (you can usually adapt the old one from RH) 
>to build your own RPM.  The latter way keeps the RPM database up to date, 
>makes it easy to install on other machines, and makes it possible to 
>uninstall everything.

This is now my preferred way to handle it, both at home and at work.  It's 
just cleaner, and it's usually not much more difficult than building the 
source manually (and sometimes easier!).  Often all you have to do is 
update the version number and grab the new source (which you would have 
done anyway).  And it's becoming more common for projects (like MD) to 
include their own .spec files, so all you have to do is run "rpmbuild -ta 
whatever.tar.gz"

Although with my desktop machines running Fedora, I've found that using 
apt-get and synaptic with FreshRPMs, DAG and ATRPMs is very nice.  Often if 
I don't need something right away, I'll wait a day or two, see if it shows 
up, and only then build my own package.


Kelson Viber
SpeedGate Communications <www.speed.net>