Updating Software when it was originally installed by an RPM
 

Hi,

This is a rather silly general question but it's been bothering me for months.

I have a test machine running SLES 7 and there were so many times that I would want to recompile added features in the software (ie. recompile PHP to work with Oracle, add SASL support to Sendmail, update the GLIBC, etc, etc).

Does anyone know of, or have some sort of general strategy to make updates to the software when you aren't 100% sure how it is installed?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jason

:Pengy:

To check to see if a package was installed via rpm
rpm -q package_name
no version number is necessary

To update
rpm -Uvh [rpm package]

However if you want something other than the default settings you'll want either the rpm source or raw source packages.

First you'll want to remove the old rpm by
rpm -e [package name]
Then install the new rpm.