Cliff Wells wrote:
You know, I first started using linux with Slackware, back when it came on a dozen floppy disks and everything was tarballs that you compilled yourself.On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 09:25, Chinmay Nadkarni wrote:I have been on Redhat 7.2 for well over a year now, but I dont like the package management system (rpm) that redhat provides (Two words - dependency hell).
RPM's were a godsend for managing systems efficiently. Dependency Hell is only a problem for people who haven't figured out why dependencies are such a good thing and how to work with RPM's efficiently. I'm *NOT* saying that anybody is dumb or anything, just that the value of the dependencies is not obvious at first and a good explanation of it isn't easy to discover. But you can avoid pulling your hair out if
you learn the tricks of handling it.
First of all, you get a basic RHN subscription for Free, and you don't even have to give RedHat any personal info at all... So, when you install your box, run rhn_register, and then use up2date to get all your patches.
Second, you can use the command "up2date -i pkgname" to install a package that RedHat distributes, and it will automatically get the latest version, and it will auto-magically discover the dependencies and fetch and install them as well.
Third, install the rpmdb-redhat package and learn to use the
rpm --redhatprovides $PKGNAME
to discover the name of the redhat package that includes what you are looking for, then you can install the packages with "up2date -i $PKG1 $PKG2 ..."
Also, learn to use rpmfind.net to locate packages in RPM form that you need. Freshrpms.net has a lot as well. And you can always google an RPM if you need to, but check your sources reputations and their GPG keys before installing an RPM on a box that is sensitive or in a production environment.
Many tar.gz source code packages that are downloaded from websites can be easily rolled into a binary with the rpmbuild -ta pkg.tar.gz
And if you can find a .src.rpm package from a similar distribution,
like a different version of RedHat, you can always install the source rpm, edit the .spec file and then rpmbuild it.
If you have different packages that require seperate versions of a library and are version dependant then you have to learn the difference between rpm -Uvh and rpm -ivh, and you might have to rpm --basedir an rpm and then tell your program how to find the library versions it needs.
Any programs that you install yourself (not using RPM's) should go in /usr/local or /opt, NOT in /usr or /etc.
-Ben.
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