Red Hat SE and packages

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On January 27, 2005 11:30, Teddy Mills wrote:
> Using RPMS packages consistently can be a problem.
> When RPMS packages start tripping over each other.
> If possible, use source.tars.

I am not familiar with this "RPM packages start tripping all over each other" 
scenario you speak of. Perhaps you have been doing things like rpm --nodeps 
-ivh bla? It seems to me bypassing the package manager and installing from 
source will leave the machine in a much greater mess than using RPM properly. 
If you know how to install from source, you already know most of what you 
need to know to create your own RPMs so if there is something you cannot find 
in an RPM repository, just create your own RPM. Regardless of whether you 
install from source or create your own RPM, you still have to work out the 
dependencies anyway so put in the marginally extra effort to create the RPM 
and let RPM do its job. If you are content to install from source, why bother 
with RPM based distros at all? Why not just use Slackware and be done with 
it? Or, better yet, use Gentoo which at least does have a decent package 
manager, Portage.

Having said that, of course you can run into:

rpm -ivh foo
Cannot install foo, need bar.
rpm -ivh bar foo
Cannot install bar, need baz.
... etc.

With just straight RPM, you can assemble all the dependencies and then rpm 
-ivh the whole lot of them. RPM will work out the order that it has to 
install.

Alternately, yum and urpmi both handle that quite well on distros that have 
them. I am more familiar with urpmi. If you do:

urpmi foo

It will come back with:

Need to install:
bar
baz
bleep
Install?[Y/n]

If you agree, that will fetch bar, baz, bleep, and foo (assuming your urpmi 
repositories are on line and not on a CD), work out the order to install, and 
just install. Note, the formatting of the output may not be exact as I am 
doing it from memory.

If you ever get a "missing libfoo.so.1" message when you are trying to install 
something:

urpmf libfoo.so.1

will return the package that contain that library. Install that package using 
urpmi and you are off to the races.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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