Centos 5.2 How To

[A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk]

Hi,

> Just one comment from a system management point of view: if you run
> CentOS, meant as a stable production OS, you probably wants to care
> for not screwing up your system.  Installing software without an
> RPM, especially software that already is provided by the distro
> itself, is the *worst* thing someone can do.

only for the sake that this mailing list is archived and some
PHB will end up reading this and thinking its the truth.

rubbish

there is nothing wrong with using software from source and
then using the system libraries and compiler to make it. if
it was bad then the first thing distros in general would do is
NOT supply gcc, make, g77 et al.

> For RHEL/CentOS, if you're not happy with the distro version (I had
> the same problem with CentOS 4), you should carefully backport
> (often a rebuild is enough) a recent Fedora RPM and install that.

and the difference between rpmbuild and ./configure itself
is the fact that the package is then treated like other packages.
fine. but if all your homebuilt stuff lives out of the system tree - 
eg in /opt or /usr/local/ then you can delete all the non RPM
stuff whenever you like

alan