On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:
To: centos@centos.org From: Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com Subject: Re: [CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system
On 9/17/2010 1:21 PM, Keith Roberts wrote:
How to download, md5sum check, unpack, configure and compile a GPL *.tar.gz package.
As SysAdmin that's something they will need to do sooner or later :)
But it's much more important to know all the reasons *not* to do that except as a last resort. Reasons that someone who has had to maintain and update such things for decades will know that won't occur to an inexperienced beginner. You can summarize by saying "yum update is a lot easier".
Of course.
But what if they want/need to install a package that is not available in any of the repos? Maybe even just for testing purposes?
Yes, that's where the 'last resort' comes in... But you are right, you should also know how to build things that live in /usr/local or under your home directory. Sometimes there are special purpose needs for things that don't exist as rpms yet or you need concurrent access to different versions. And I'm sure someone will add that you should also know how to build your own rpm if I don't mention it, but that can be non-trivial compared to just staying out of the way of the system-managed space.
That's almost getting into repository management. I've looked at this rpm guide:
http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm-snapshot/
I found this very helpfull in understanding how to use RPM, and it also goes into details about creating rpm packages.
Regards,
Keith
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