Stupid question:

When you install an rpm you need to pick one for your processor/platform: i.e. i386, powerpc, etc.

Is that necessary with source code installs? In other words can you download the tar.gz file for, say, sudo, and run that on intel and powerpc platforms or is source code also broken up into processor type?

And while I am at it, why do I still need to do "make" and "make install" from binaries? Isn't it the whole point that binaries are pre-compiled?

And lastly (phew!) why install rpm's of source code? Why not just install tar.gz files of source?

Thanks.

Bret

Usually source code tarballs are either specified as per platform in the name, like nmap-2.54beta_x86linux.tar.gz(which doesn't exist), or much more often the case, the tarball includes the source for all architectures it supports. You're probably used to the three step source dance of:

./configure
make
make install

Autoconf, which is the first thing the configure script usually checks for, will supply the script with the architecture type of the machine. Therefore, if your box is a PII, everything you compile from source will probably be optimized for a PII. I say probably because in many utilities architecture is inconsequential to its functioning.

Source RPMs... uh... so you only have to get used to the vagaries of one compression utility...er... yeah: RedHat wanting to rule the world.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks for the info!

Bret

lol - yeah... in the future, red hat will rule the market will an iron-fisted monopoly, and microsoft will be a small struggling company trying desparately to bring choice to the computing world.