I'd like to compile GIT on our company's SLES10 machine. Unfortunately, the system is missing a few dependencies and it has been locked down such that no more packages can be installed on a system-wide basis. The missing packages, so far as I can tell, are:

curl-devel

openssl-devel

Is there some way to easily compile these packages in my home directory by making use of the SRPMs? The problem that I'm running into is that curl depends on openssl. I can compile the openssl SRPM, but I have no means to install it, so that doesn't help me around the dependency problem. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Greg

Talk to your sysadmin and ask him to install the needed packages. No longer than it would take him, he should have no objections.

This is much more easily said than done. I work in the Nuclear industry, and we live with some fairly stringent QA procedures. Once the computing platform is certified and approved for production calculations, it's effectively set in stone.

As much as the Admins would love to help, they've been given orders not to mess with anything unless it's absolutely necessary.

Usually the NRC (assuming US) certifies the machine and distro (including above packages), but if your internal QA has an issue, then you are pretty much stuck.

There are a number of ways around this however.

A couple of them would be:

1. Compile everything in your home, then compile curl statically, so you don't need external libs to run it.
2. Compile everything in your home, then install everything in a fake home directory that all the users can read, use then a wrapper script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH+=/home/sharedhomedir/usr/lib and launches curl
3. Compile everything in your home, then distribute all the needed stuff in a tarball and let the rest of users deal with it.

Probably 1 is easier if it can be done.

Edit: for 1 try this: http://myt.ag/URLWeb.aspx?email=stev...f0115.html&sn=

Will any of the methods get past his QA requirements?

I don't know what his QA requirements are, so I can't tell for sure. But as long as the home directories are not mounted "noexec", it should run. Another entirely different question is whether the admis will be happy about the users being that smart or not.

In 1 and 3, the binaries will live in your home, so no modification to the system is needed if that's what you ask. It all comes down to one fact: do they allow you to run binaries from your home? If you can run your own bash scripts on your home then you should have no problems running any other kind of executable file.