[ale] Debian or Slackware package management

[James P. Kinney III]

On Sat, 2003-11-08 at 00:39, Jim Seymour wrote:

> Maybe I made it more difficult than it needed to be.  I would get the 
> older source rpm and install that.  Then I would put the newer source 
> tarball in /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES and make changes to the spec file to 
> use the newer source and check to see if the patches were still needed 
> from the older source rpm.  After that a "rpm -ba foo.spec" from within 
> the SPECS dir.  Most of the time I could not solve the build problems.  
> If there is a better way with Red Hat's rpm then I will try Fedora Core 
> instead since I am more used to Red Hat's way of doing things.

That process can be very difficult, as you know.

What I do is get the new tarball and the old spec file and nothing else.
First I make sure the new tarball compiles cleanly and note any
--with-foo flags I need to add to the configure part. It would be good
to use the configure script to generate a requires list, but the src.rpm
won't build if the configure part fails anyway.

Then I strip out (comment, actually) all the flags and patch references
in the old spec file. I substitute in the new version number and set the
build number and run a test build.

The main time factor is making sure all of the files to be installed are
listed. Using the %macros helps. I also hack some setup and tear down
shell scripts when needed and include those in a fresh re-tar of the
source.

Then I get tired and go dig on rpmfind.net for a src.rpm and try
building from that :)

-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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