By the way, making an rpm would be cool. I have made a script that downloads compiles and installs everything (please forgive my "newbieness").
The script is at http://www.woralelandia.com/downloads/LAMP-2005-Install/
The script downloads everything and puts it in the right dirs. Builds thingy by thingy and it even installs the MySQLi extension automatically.
I agree... you have to be root... root is not good when compiling...
Is this bad?
Yes; this is a security issue, and poorly-written spec files or Makefiles can result in accidental damage to your installation if you do RPM builds as root.
Building packages as a regular user is easy; you just need to create a ~/.rpmmacros file with a few lines in it, plus a few directories to take the place of /usr/src/redhat/*/*
http://freshrpms.net/docs/fight/ is a good introduction to building RPMs and includes details of how to do it as a non-root user.
> can RPM's use rsync?
Yes, but you wouldn't need to for what you are doing. All I'm suggesting is to tweak the RPMs you have, not to package the whole thing up as a single RPM.
What I'd suggest is to tweak the PHP SRPM so that it builds and includes the new MySQL extension instead of the old one.
Paul.
