how to upgrade an installed binary 'package' to a later version with the source.
 

Hello, i am running Opensuse 12.1. I installed The Gimp 2.8rc and was very happy with it. I'm devoting to it and upgrading to the full stable release. I've removed the previous packages. I've compiled babl, gegl, and upgraded glib with the tumbleweed repo (i know mixing repos is not recommend, but i've done it before and can manage).
Opensuse 12.1 has GTK+ 2.24.7, and i need 2.24.10. Tumbleweed is also using this version so i am going to have to compile this later version of gtk from source too.

How does one go about upgrading a package installed from an rpm binary, to a later version from the source code.

(I'm fine for the compiling process, it's just going from binary to source that i'm lost on)
Do i have to remove the binaries first and then just to a normal source compile, or is there another method?

Thankyou

If installing from source on an rpm-based system, it would probably be best to remove the rpm before installing from source. The rpm writes files to certain locations as directed by the .spec file which was used to make the .rpm. The source package may not install to the same locations. That would leave stray code lying about that may cause some system confusion.

Further, the rpm database will not reflect the installation from source. Any queries in re gimp would return information on the last rpm that was installed, and not the source installation.

Or, you could learn how to make a binary rpm for yourself. It requires the source package and a .spec file which tells rpm what to do with the source. The resulting binary .rpm can be used to upgrade gimp in the usual manner via yast or zypper.

The hardest part of that route is learning to write a .spec file. You will find a lot of information on the web on that topic.

Once upon a time, there was a program called checkinstall that would create a very crude rpm from a binary (after make but before make-install). I used it for several years to generate rpm files so that I wouldn't have to worry about programs not managed by the the rpm package manager. Searching my misc. rpms folder, I see that the latest version of checkinstall on my hard drive is checkinstall-1.6.2.16-2mdv2011.0.x86_64.rpm. Although it's a Mandriva rpm, it apparently worked fine under whatever version of Fedora I was running at the time.