On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 08:31, Martin Airs <camberwell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Could you not install from sources > > get poppler.?.?.?.src.rpm > > then rpmbuild --rebuild poppler.?.?.?.src.rpm > > that should build you a centos rpm At work, some of my colleagues prefer to compile and install from source into '/usr/local' for non-distro software. I happen to think that way of doing things is just a whole lot of extra work for nothing. Usually, I prefer to use the route that Martin describes: Rebuild the Fedora SRPM on your CentOS/RH box, and install the binaries that it outputs. Usually, libraries will be backwards-compatible, so you don't need to worry about breaking any existing deps. (This is why most packages will just express specifically-versioned deps as "Library X, at any version greater than Y.Z"--future revisions of the library past Y.Z probably aren't going to remove any functionality or break any existing expectations.) But often enough, newer versions of some package will break existing behavior. Python is a good example of this: Fedora broke older Zope applications that depended on older Python versions when it moved to Python 2.6, which raised a small amount of Cain with the users of the broken Zope apps. (Fedora's official philosophy is that they don't want to stall their progress, or make extra work for the distro maintainers, just because some random app developer is too busy to update his code to use the latest Zope/Python. I happen to think it's a reasonable stance.) If you find yourself in the latter situation, you do have the option of convert the original dependency into a 'compat-' style package, which moves the older version's installed files into a different path on the filesystem, so that you can keep both the older and newer versions installed at the same time. In the case of the Python 2.4->2.6 transition, one of the 3rd-party YUM repos (I think ATRPMs, but it might be RPMFusion) built a package called 'compat-python24' that moved the Python installation from '/usr/lib/python' to '/usr/lib/python24' (and similarly for '/usr/bin', etc.). So 2.6 is your default Python if you call '/usr/bin/python', but 2.4 is available if you call '/usr/bin/python24', instead. But it can be a heck of a lot of work to convert everything, and then you become responsible for maintaining the 'compat-' package, too. I think that the extra work is the reason why Fedora doesn't usually just do this by default. There are exceptions, but only with good reasons attached. -Ryan -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
