Dear all,

I need to upgrade a tarball which i have installed. Do I simply install the new version and it will automatically overwrite the files from the older version?

I know for rpm -Uvh can do that, but not sure tarball.

any help?

Thanks in advance,

consider this, a tarball is just like a zip file. It's just a folder compressed into 1 file. So you are really not upgrading anything. It's the same as if you have a folder called "program1.0" and one called "program 1.1". You are going to delete the 1.0 one and replace it with 1.1. However, if within the tarball is an installer, then you've got a whole different issue.

Thanks reynacho_au,

Yeah, actually I made a mistake in my question. What I mean is a tarball with installed in it.

So to upgrade , do I just run a ./configure , make, make install for the newer version and it will replace the older version?

Thanks again,

The safe play is to read the INSTALL, README & CHANGELOG files for tips on upgrading, as well as what changed. "Usually" though, so long as you configure it the same way, ie same install prefix & etc etc (you can get the old info from the config.log, config.nice or some other file in the old source tree if you kept it), you can install one over the other without issue, if you stay within the same major release level. By that I mean most source is released as x.y.z where x = Major, y = Minor, & z = Revision. If that Major number changes then you should probably backup any config files for the app and uninstall it, then install the new version fresh and reference your old config files for setting it back up. Still though, don't just blindly follow that, take the time to read the docs.

On your previous tarball, do a make uninstall, then ./configure, make and make install the new tarball.

But some (or most really) don't have a make uninstall and if you really want to do a clean upgrade you'll have to remove all old files by hand. This is why I only install packages (checkinstall is my best friend).