Hello Ben, Sunday, December 23, 2001, 12:31:55 AM, you textually orated:
Having seen the many (long) discussions that have gone on before, I thought I'd give you some advise. BTW, you've definitely made some great progress in your learning, good job. <snip> BO> Why am I working from source? More control. This is inaccurate. Jason had been trying to point out that you could get the SRPMS (source) and accomplish anything you can with the tarball. Also, he subtly pointed out that you may find the upgrade process more involved and create yourself a slew of new issues to "learn" about. While there is obviously a great benefit to learning new things, sometimes it is better to learn _why_ one way is being used instead of another. Benefits of RPM are actually greater then most people realize even though it has a few shortcomings still (though up2date tries to fill those gaps). It doesn't appear that you have been an admin for too long or for too many (concurrent) machines at one time. When you do things from source, best practice is to make sure you track what you installed, when you installed it, what flags you used to compile (so next time you can keep consistent), where is was placing things and what you had to modify to get the source version (if you didn't change the flags to be distribution friendly (RH is not very source compile friendly)) to work with your current config. This way when you have to (or want to) upgrade something you have the least amount of aggravation. This is where RPM helps out. It keeps things consistent (though sometimes contradictory to the author's original plan) and tracks all of the details for you. It also attempts to make the upgrade path smooth (though not always). Some things to think about now that you've compiled from source... Did you make sure to modify the init scripts for these services? If so did you track those changes so if you install a security update or the like and it changes them you can put it back? Are you putting the initialization in rc.local? If so are you keeping a separate backup incase something overwrites it? Are other RPM based packages going to conflict, cause dependency issues or cause other problems later? RPM is a tool to make your life easier. It does not restrict your ability to customize (that's why there are SRPMS). Learn more about it and it will also teach you about compiling programs (the scripts you are writing is basically part of a .spec file). It is quite powerful and very convenient once you get the hang of it. BO> You know this stuff better than me, so for now, I'll work from source BO> (not that much more difficult) and _learn_ how things work ;) BenO Why not take a few minutes and learn more about RPM using these (IMHO) excellent tutorials about RPM. It give a basic working example. Then go read some other .spec files to see what kind of stuff goes on in them. Part 1 - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-rpm1/ Part 2 - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-rpm2/ If compiling from source was really easier/better, no one would have written RPM or apt-get. I would recommend using a package manager even if I was going to compile everything myself. You'll eventually learn that the difference in using one is not so much the time/difficulty in the initial set-up/install, but in the long term of maintenance and upgrades. As always, YMMV. Have fun, -- _________________________________________________________________ Brian Ashe CTO [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dee-Web Software Services, LLC. http://www.dee-web.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
