RPMed software vs. non RPMed versions
 

So let's say I have OpenOffice 1.0.2 installed on my RH9 system. When I do
an "rpm -qa | grep -i openoffice" from the shell, I get a handful of rpms
all with the string "1.0.2" embedded within them. Fine. But now I find that
there is a version 1.1, and I'd like to upgrade. So I go to openoffice.org,
and quickly find that the official version does not come in an RPM.
Its just a big tarball, presumably with an install.sh or something.

So: do I a) forget about my RPMs of 1.0.2 and just follow the directions
for installing 1.1 with the tarball/install.sh; or 2) uninstall the RPMs of
1.0.2 with "rpm -e", then install the tarball? Both of these sound
less than perfect to me - I'd like to have a way to preserve any
preferences/profiles etc. I might have set up in the older version.

And this begs the larger, more general question, and this may simply
reflect my ignorance of RPMs. If you have some software installed
as an RPM, is there a clean, by-the-book way to upgrade to
non-RPMed versions of the same? If you didn't first un-RPM the old
software, would you end up with two different versions on your system,
or would they fight with each other in some way? Is it possible,
depending on who rolled up your RPM, for you to install 1.1 as an RPM
in such a way that it does NOT understand that it is supposed to
supercede 1.0.2, such that even with RPMs all around, you end up
with both the old and the new versions of the software on your
system?

Thanks.

well, i can answer some of your questions

there are a lot of options for rpm including an update option
type "man rpm" (no ")

i installed open office 1.1 on a system with 1.0.2 aleady on, it installed to the location
i chose (but did offer a default) and didn't interfere with the previous version. I then had to manually add
shortcuts on the desktop & panel as it didn't appear in the menu's.

don't know enough to answer the rpm -e bit

there may be ways of firing up the install script that comes with OO1.1 that can make it overwrite/update the existing installation, but i'm not aware of them