Hi. I've just built rpms (and installed them) from source rpms for the first time. It does seem to me that the additional effort involved is worth it, given that I know that the binary code that results is compiled with the current (and updated through apt-get) compiler, and linked against the libraries that I have on my machine. BTW: I installed Acrobat Reader 5.08.

I'm running rh9 (soon to be Fedora core I hope), and have had to do things in tthe past such as install a rh6.x rpm of xfig, as I couldn't find a newer one (I know how to get a newer one now).

Is there any reason why I shouldn't always, where I have a choice, preferentially download and install source rpms?

Is there any way of getting synaptic or apt-get to download and build from src, rather than downloading binaries?

Thanks in anticipation,

Ross-c

Hi Ross,

well, IMHO one reason why one could consider not installing every single package from SRPMs is that this will force you to have many -devel packages installed as well when it wouldn't really have been necessary.

I do go for RPMS sometimes, but only on some specific cases (like when I can't find the most up-to-date version of one package), but usually I grab pre-built RPMs from sites such as Freshrpms. YMMV.

As for downloading sources, I am not sure synaptic can do this, but apt-get apparently can, with the commands 'source' and the '-b' option (I have never tried it, though). 'apt-get --help' gives this:

Commands:
[...]
source - Download source archives

Options:
[...]
-b Build the source package after fetching it

HTH

Andre

You have been fooled with this particular src.rpm. Nothing is recompiled or relinked. Acrobat Reader is not Open Source. The src.rpm you have built only extracts a binary-only archive of Acrobat Reader and adds a few features, such as a desktop menu entry, wrapper script or may be a work-around for startup problems in an UTF-8 locale.

Thanks for the advice. Yes, I was downloading acrobat rpms to get around the UTF-8 problem (which I found another way of fixing on the net). The first rpm (binary) that I downloaded complained about a signing mismatch or something vaguely similar. So, I downloaded the src rpm instead, and it worked.

Cheers,

Ross-c