Les Mikesell wrote:
On 9/17/2010 1:06 PM, Keith Roberts wrote:
<snip>
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".
Excerpt when a user comes to you and asks you to install a package for which there isn't any rpm... or, for that matter, when you're force to use CPAN to install a module for which there's no .rpm, and then the build fails, but works if you cd into /root/.cpan/BUILD/<pgmsource> and make....
mark