Upgrade to 2.2.0

[John Dennis]

On 10/09/2012 11:55 AM, John Horne wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-10-09 at 11:19 -0400, John Dennis wrote:
>>
>> By using a rpm spec file to build rpms from you'll get all the nasty
>> details of correct building handled for you. There are 2.2 rpms
>> available for Fedora. Just be aware spec files are also tuned for
>> specific Red Hat releases, you'll need to understand the differences
>> between Fedora and RHEL 5. All in all it can be non-trivial to get all
>> the details of building and installing a system daemon correct, this
>> is why we normally recommend folks use pre-build packages for their
>> distribution.
>>
> Unfortunately (?) the differences now between Fedora and RHEL,
> especially in terms of Fedora using systemctl rather than SysV startup
> scripts, means that using a Fedora SPEC file to build a package for RHEL
> is generally fraught with problems.
>
> However. I have this afternoon been rebuilding FreeRadius 2.2 using the
> latest CentOS 5.8 freeradius2 RPM SPEC file. (Basically, using a SPEC
> file that you know will work on the server, but replace the actual
> source tarball with the latest available.) In this instance the
> modifications to the SPEC file were minor, but one patch also had to be
> modified. So, again, not trivial, you need to know a bit about SPEC
> files and patching, but it did build.
>
> I should add that for other packages this approach hasn't been too good!
> The differences between code versions can mean that a lot of patches in
> the RPM either become redundant or need modifying. It can add up to a
> lot of work.

Yup. It's probably easier to modify an existing spec file for a 
distribution than trying to move spec files between distributions.

If you want the latest version and a set of RPM's is not yet available 
you basically have 2 choices:

1) local build using configure/make/install

2) local RPM build using a tweaked spec file

Which is easier? It depends on a lot of factors. But no matter which 
approach you take:

You must fully understand what you're doing and why.

There just aren't any shortcuts to this.

If you want to use approach 1, then I suggest at least looking at the 
configure command in an appropriate spec file and see what options are 
being passed to it, then do something similar in your build.


-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

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