Mickael Maddison wrote:
Ok. So basically, every response on this list feels that RPM's are sufficiently stable, are created fast enough to address security concerns that come up, and have all the 'normal' functionality that pretty much anyone needs... is that a fair statement?
Yes. Out of interest what features, in the apps you mentioned in your original post, did you need to compile in that weren't in the RPMs?
The one thing I've always liked about installing from tarball distributions is that I prefix everything into /usr/local -- so it's easy to find all the pieces. This is perhaps the one thing that I find most annoying about RPM; spreading things all over the place. Of course, being able to custom compile modules etc. has worked well.
rpm -ql packagename is easier to find the pieces than searching through /usr/local IMHO. Anyway packages are still consistent - they put config files in /etc, binaries in /usr/bin, libs in /usr/lib, shared files in /usr/share and so on: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/
QUESTION: Do most of you cron the yum updates, or do you watch for new RPMs and update "manually"?
We have a Nagios check that notifies when updates are available. Then we do a yum update so we can see what's going to be updated before confirming with 'y' or 'n'.