Centos 5.2 How To

[Ted Lum]

Where a particular distro typically supports a particular application, 
like FreeRadius, through its normal repository/package manager it is a 
very bad idea to simply configure/build from source. The original poster 
of this assertion is absolutely correct. The .spec for the rpmbuild 
often calls out specific alterations/augmentations required for that 
specific Linux distro, often dealing with things that are not covered in 
the more general .src package like SELinux and such. It may also tailor 
directories as required for that distro. And there is a myriad of other 
conditions. The real trouble can happen when an upgrade becomes 
available in the repo and your source build gets overlaid, sorta kinda, 
by the package which I've had trash more then one working system - 
before I learned my lesson. You can also end up with older versions 
getting installed because the package manager is not aware of the newer 
version. Without intimate knowledge of the true differences for a given 
package, always doing an rpmbuild from valid .spec, where this is an 
option, is to error on the side of caution. Not heading this advice is 
likely to case a lot of pain, frustration and frantic posts to mail 
lists like this that could have been avoided.

-Ted-

A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk wrote:
> 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
> -
> List info/subscribe/unsubscribe? See http://www.freeradius.org/list/users.html
>
>   


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