On Sun, 2010-10-10 at 17:56 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
so, is that reasonable? to just manually add an extra repo file according to that link above (which appears to work perfectly well).
In my opinion, in most cases there is no particularly good reason to bother compiling a source rpm yourself unless it's something that's not already in a repository.
If what you need is not in one of the repositories, then my next step is to either download a src.rpm from somewhere else (fedora, etc.) and see what it takes to compile that, or download the tar archive and see if I can find a .spec file somewhere that does something close to what I'm trying to accomplish. Sometimes there is an old version or a MDK source rpm that contains a .spec file that will provide a starting point. If not, then if it's not a really complex install you can just copy a spec file from another not really complex rpm and use that for a framework.
frankly, the wiki page on downloading from source:
http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/SourceInstalls
seems just a touch on the hysterical side.
Sounds like pretty good advice to me. I try really hard to install stuff through rpm's. The only exception is with single-executable programs that can just be tossed into /usr/local/bin or ~/bin or whatever; those are generally programs that I have written myself or little utilities downloaded from here and there.
If it's a single-executable program without a bunch of support files and whatnot, and if I'm planning to install it on only one or two computers, then it's probably not worth the effort to create a rpm for it. Anything else, is.