On Monday 21 January 2008, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: >Gene Heskett wrote: >> I had enough livna troubles to last me a while when I was running FC6. If >> I have to move outside the auspices of the rpm packagers, then I've found >> I'm far better off to just build the tarball and be done with it. Which >> is what I did with mplayer itself, but not its plugin, which was >> available. >> >> Thanks Mikkel. > >Rather then building directly from the source, you may want to >consider downloading the source RPM and building from that. That >way, you are still using the package manager. That way, it will >hopefully warn you when an update is going to break things. > >I have done this for a lot of packages. The only drawback is that >when you go to update, you may have to remove the packages yourself >before you can update to the next release of Fedora. It helps if you >keep a record of the packages you build, both to help when you >upgrade, and so you know what you are going to have to build again. >Because I build RPMs as a user, I normally have the ones I build in >my home directory, so it is easy. If I want to use the same version, >I just rebuild the package from the source RPM, using the updated >libraries. If not, the old spec file is a good place to start if I >can not get a source RPM for the new version. > >Mikkel Unforch, I have yet to come onto a tutorial on writing spec files that explains it in sufficient detail that _I_ can understand it. If I want an rpm, I may use checkinstall, but its so bloody broken that by the time I get a good rpm built with it, the spec file, and its dependency list are badly broken. I built a gutenprint that ran my printer perfectly, but had to use smarts ability to freeze a version in place else the updates from FC6 insisted on installing gimp-print-4.2.7, a 5 year old orphaned for the last 4 years package, over the top of it. My printer is an antique Epson C82, but gimp-print-4.2.7 never heard of it other than as a generic. Now if someone were to write a tutorial on spec file's, starting at the McGuffy's Readers level, I MIGHT be able to do that. If it exists, I haven't found it, and I have asked here for guidance several times. Thanks Mikkel. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Aliquid melius quam pessimum optimum non est.
