Sorry to be answering my own questions but this is the reply I got from somebody I seeked help from. On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Kelvin Teh wrote: > Under advice of a guru on the net I have decided that compiling source > myself is the way to go at this time. I do have a question, does RPMs > necessarily mean that the contents are the binaries or just a fancy tarred > up source? There are 3 basic types of RPMS: There are the archetecture dependent binaries. There are the rpms like .i386.rpm, .alpha.rpm, and so on. You pick the right one for your machine, and there is no need to recompile. Then there are the source RPMS, .src.rpm. Those are the ones you want to download if you are compiling them yourself. I believe all you have to do is "rpm --rebuild xxx.src.rpm", and then you will have the binary RPM, compiled on your machine, in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386. You can then install that like a normal RPM. There may be a better approach, that is just what I have done. There are also .noarch.rpm. Those are script files, or possibly java files. Basically, anything that doesn't have to be compiled to run across multiple machines. Documentation would also fall into this category. RPM is an amazing thing... *Very* full featured. You have to carve off little bits of it at a time to figure it out.
