Thanks, Paul. I suspected that was the case.
Thus far I have not been brave (foolhardy?) enough to try building RPMs from source.
Recent exchanges on list, though, have provided enough info to prompt an attempt or two.
I gather that the key is lies in assuring that the libraries application developers identify as needed to support an application release reside somewhere on my system and their location is defined for the rpm build.
Paul Howarth wrote:
On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 14:08 -0500, David Curry wrote:
Thx to Erik Olsen and all respondents to his question about installation of updates application packages currently available only in tar format. Very informative and useful.
Rahul Sundaram's response (shown below) raised additonal questions I hope some on the list will address.
As I currently understand fedora processes and structure, development tree are primarily (solely?) oriented toward the latest official core release (FC3) and the forthcoming official core release (FC4). Are some development tree packages directly useable on up-to-date FC2 and/or FC1 systems as well?
I am primarily interested in open source desktop/productivity applications such as abiword, OpenOffice.org, Gnumeric, Mysql, firefox, thunderbird, etc. if that is a relevant factor.
Binary RPMs pulled from the development tree will very likely have dependencies that can't be satisfied without installing a bunch of new libraries. Sometimes (e.g. with a big GUI app like evolution) the system you'd be left with would be as close to the development tree as it was to the system you started with, with all the problems that that would bring. What sometimes works though is to build the RPM from source on the target system, which will result in a package linked against the original system's libraries, hence less of a change. This doesn't always work though, as there may be specific library requirements that would force you to upgrade some libraries before you could build or run a package. So it depends on how much you want the upgraded version of your app and how much trouble you're prepared to go to to get it installed.
Paul.
