Building & Installing on Red Hat Systems (Was: Make error - Solved)

[Jos Vos]

On Tue, Dec 02, 2008 at 09:18:25AM +0000, A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk wrote:

> it would help immensely if Fedora, RHEL, CentOS et al actually
> supplied up to date version of FreeRADIUS - ie at least 2.0.5
> (if not 2.1.1 !) rather than the historic 1.1.x (or even 1.0.x!)
> 
> if such a version was available via yum/up2date then almost
> all queries for how to build source on such distros would
> disappear

OK, I can't resist reacting again:

RHEL (and thus CentOS) are conservative "enterprise" distros and thus
do *not* include the newest ("bleeding edge") release of everything
as soon as it comes out.  They want to stay compatible through the
7 (!) years of support time.  This is how it is and this is, in
principle, a good idea (for that purpose).  Exceptions are made
(Firefox 3 is included now) and security bugs are fixed via backports.
But if FreeRADIUS would be bumped to a higher release, there will
probably be incompatibilities that are, in principe, not acceptable.

Fedora has a different policy and *does* include recent releases *now*
(in fact, these RPMs were built on November 25): F9 *and* F10 have 2.2.1.

If you have the need for a newer release on RHEL/CentOS, the best
recipe is to take a Fedora src.rpm and rebuild it on your RHEL/CentOS
version.  This might require some changes (and some knowledge about
RPM and other things).

Packaging software for a distro means *integrating* the software in
the distro (examples are changes to init scripts, compliance with
local packaging standards, etc.) so it's better to start with the
Fedora package, being part of the "Red Hat family of distros", than
with the generic FreeRADIUS RPM (this applies to almost all software).

B.t.w. if there is the need for a more "neutral" version of this story
for a FAQ or wiki, I'm happy to write that.  It's really important that
people understand the philosophy of distros.

-- 
--    Jos Vos <jos at xos.nl>
--    X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV   |   Phone: +31 20 6938364
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