Graham,
> Our department's main teaching and research computing resource is now
> provided by a network of Linux machines, running Red Hat, each of
> which has local copies of as much software as possible. We keep them
> up to date by using rpms to update the local copies.
Sounds like you need a local RPM mirror. I'm in a similar situation
except all my machines are running the Debian distribution. I have
a local mirror which gets updated once a day. Whenever I feel a new
version is warranted on my machines, I simply ssh to each client,
apt-get update, apt-get install tetex-base tetex-bin tetex-extra.
Debian's apt-get program takes care of all the dependencies for you.
I don't know if the latest Red Hat will do this sort of thing or not.
The alternative is to have an NFS mounted /usr/local where you compile
teTeX from scratch whenever a new version comes out. All of your
client machines use this instead of a "local" /usr/local. Depending on
how many machines you have and how long it would take you to upgrade
the RPM's on all of them, this might be a better way to go. This also
has advantages for installing other programs that aren't packaged as
RPM's because you only install it once and it's available to everyone.
Chris
--
Christopher S. Swingley 930 Koyukuk Drive
System / Network Manager University of Alaska Fairbanks
IARC -- Frontier Program Fairbanks, AK 99775
phone: 907-474-2689 fax: 907-474-2643
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] GNUPG and PGP2 keys at my web site
web: http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle
