Keith wrote: > ... The problem is, almost all recent third party not-in- > the-standard-distro packages want later major revs of libraries > with new features; I can't compile or run those because the > dependencies collide.
On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 02:45:34PM -0700, Ali Corbin wrote: > Are the packages open source? If so, you might be able to fetch the > source rpm and repackage it for rhel/centos/sl. Even better, someone > might have already done this for you. > I run centos, and usually find multiple choices for packages that > aren't in centos' distro when I search in pbone. Indeed, pbone is my friend for packages that are standardized enough to appear in distros. However, I do a lot of science/technical/medical work. These oddball programs do a particular task and there are not many alternatives. The author is usually a subject specialist rather than a programmer, with bits of contributed code, borrowed code, and cargo cult code, jury rigged for the programmer's particular distro, and dependent on its idiosyncracies. The other 99.9% of sourceforge. I run more than 100 such programs on my machines, and another 50 or so that I wrote myself - 100 to 500 liners, not big stuff, usually for data reduction, algorithmic design generation, or numerical simulation. That's why I run Scientific Linux, supported by Fermilab; first, the RHEL distros are the usual platform for commercial CAD tools, second, the SL community is mostly scientists and the IT staff that feed them, third, the SL "extra" DVD includes many specialized packages that these scientists use. Long term support is required because parallelized SL runs on building-sized supercomputer clusters that run programs for days or weeks; stopping these machines for distro upgrades, then tweaking them so they work again, takes weeks and Just Isn't Done. So far, the most practical solution suggested by this thread is to run other distros as virtuals - I can live with the virtualization performance penalty for small and quick programs. For the big, slow stuff, I'll have to keep tweaking C code, sigh. Thanks for all the suggestions, folks. It's great to have hundreds of knowledgable and helpful people who are gentle but firm with the clue-stick. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
