strategy for resolving rpm dependence hell (centos)
 

What's a good strategy to resolve dependence conflicts with rpms?

I'm setting up a build environment on Centos 4. The build fails because of a missing openssl rpm. Trying to install the missing (rpm -i) gets many file conflicts. Trying to upgrade (rpm --upgrade) gets failed dependencies.

Where do I start on figuring out how make my build work. Is there a step-by-step approach to this? I'm pretty new to rpm hell and don't know where to begin.

In most distributions, the first whack should be to use package repositories and utilities to do dependency handling for you. I believe CentOS uses yum, so try this.

cent 4 . what ?? 8 .

and is there a very good reason that you HAVE to use CentOS 4.8 ( guessing on the .8)
centOS 5.5 is the current and 6 will be out soon .



it would also help if you informed us as to WHAT rpm it is you want to install that is newer than what is on the os .
that tells us nothing .

Thanks for reading my question! Yes, we're using CentOS 4.8. My employer's product is built on that and change to 5.x (or 6) won't happen for the next few months.

With apologies if you found it annoying, I deliberately left out the details of what rpm I'm trying to install because my question is about general strategy rather than this particular issue -- there are bound to be many more in my future (I've recently been moved onto Linux stuff so despite 20+ years hacking other OSes I'm still pretty ignorant about Linux) and I don't want to bother people here with trivia over and over again.

What I'd like to understand is HOW to approach resolving the dependency problem. Is there a step-by-step way to figure it out? I don't yet even really know for sure which rpm has to be installed. I know that running rpmbuild fails because of a missing file, and I know that a machine which does build successfully has certain rpms which are absent from the system I'm setting up. But I don't know how to get past the dependency that's stopping me installing the missing rpms. I'd appreciate any suggestions please.

general might be to use yum( if installed) or rpm and force it BUT if it is a system file than you might KILL the OS .
for example if it is glib installing a different rpm than what is installed , would not be good -- to put it mildly

i take it yum is installed
let yum handle the dependencies


use "yum "

rpm pkgs are prog individual pkgs. To install them & their dependencies(!), do NOT try to install the rpms individually/direct. Instead, use the provided tool(s) designed to handle dependencies for you.

On RHEL/Centos 4.x, the original tool was called 'up2date'. On 4.8 you should also be able to install another tool called yum , which was originally created to replace up2date for RHEL 5.x series and then backported to be avail for 4.x.
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-2531
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ide/index.html
HTH

Welcome to LQ :)