Hello everyone. I wanted to start a thread to share my experiences as well as gain some insight on a few things I would like to do...

As it is right now, I run about a dozen Linux servers, most running Red Hat. All the servers are running great, but if there is one thing that really drives me crazy at times, it is when I am trying to install certain parts of software or upgrade certain parts of software...

Yes, I admint, RPM's can make life easy sometimes. But sometimes, they can make life a living hell. At this point, I prefer to install all software now from source. I have more control and flexability over it and I usually run into many many less problems (ala, RPM Dependency hell)...

So here is what I want to know/learn...
First, i'd like to learn how to start building my own RPM's and Source RPMS from source tarballs. I know how to take a source RPM and build binary RPMS, but I want to learn how to go out, fetch the latest source tarball for foo.tar.gz and build Source RPMS and binary RPMS....I have ordered Maximum RPM as well as the new RH RPM book...any other suggestions?


Ok...more importantly.
What I want to know is, what is the best way to update software on my servers that has been installed via RPM, but not use Red Hats up2date system?
For example: One of my servers is RH 7.3. The latest release for OpenSSH for 7.3 is like 3.1 or something like that, which is way old and I want to run current software.

With that in mind, what is a good way that I can grab the source pacakge for lets say openssh, and then install it on my server? Basically, upgrading my current openssh with the new one. I'd also like to maintain a 'clean' system and remove any old junk from the openssh 3.1 package...

Anyone have some tips or better yet, links on how to do this?

I appreciate it...

Tarballed

from my experience, the author has to follow a few guidelines in order for you to make rpms from a tarball. but if the requirements are met then using the command while su'ed as root will make binary and source rpms.

'rpm -ta source.tar.gz'

examples of source tarballs that you can build rpms out of are xine and xscreensaver.

as far as taking tarballs not ready for making rpms, i'm not sure how to go about that.

Right...I recall that reading that some where...

Other than that, any idea on how to upgrade software that has been installed via RPM, but using source to update?

I get tired of waiting for updated rpms to be released...

Tarballed

the only thing i can think of is to try to uninstall the old version and then upgrade using the source tarball as you can't be too sure that the distros didn't use other target directories than the author uses in the source. i had a problem once with upgrading xscreensaver because red hat installs xscreensaver in other directories than where the source specified. so i kept getting the wrong password prompt which had the old version number while xscreensaver-demo had the new version number. plus, the rpm database only had the old version of xscreensaver listed. that was compiling from source and installing from source (before i even thought of using rpm -ta). i then figured out xscreensaver rpms could be built and that solves those issues above.

but if you want to have upgrade in the rpm database, the only thing i can think of is to figure out what requirements need to be met for a source tarball to be compiled to rpms.

If you want to upgrade from source the best thing to do is uninstall the old version with rpm -e then install the source package.

If you go ahead and install the source package, it will most likely not replace but instead install into a different directory. When you do a "make install" make sure you write down where it was installed. If two versions of the same program are installed you will have to use the absolute path to execute the new one. This has happened to me more than once. For instance I had a version of the ice window manager installed via rpm then I installed a newer one via source. The RPM version is in
/usr/X11R6/bin/icewm and /usr/bin/X11/icewm
the one from source in
/usr/local/bin/icewm
so to use the new one in .xinitrc I have to
exec /usr/local/bin/icewm

So basically, if you install via RPM and there is not an updated pacakages, you have two options:

1.) Try and build your own binary RPMS from the latest source release (build src.rpm or just .rpm)

2.) Uninstall the RPM and install the source..

SO is the moral of the story this:

'Dont mix RPMS and Source?"

Tarballed

Check out these two apps

Check install
http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/

APT-RPM
http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/scripts/apt-rpm.html