In article 1208548520.4908.58.camel@wx1.larc.nasa.gov, Philip R. Schaffner Philip.R.Schaffner@NASA.gov wrote:

On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 17:05 +0000, Tony Mountifield wrote:

...

Hi, I want to take a SRPM that is available for various versions of Fedora and rebuild it on a CentOS 4 system.

Which release of Fedora is the closest to CentOS 4? In other words, which would be the best FC to take the SRPM for?

Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux

Originally, Red Hat based Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Red Hat Linux, but using a much more conservative release cycle. Later versions leveraged technologies from Fedora which is a community distribution and project that Red Hat sponsors. Roughly every third version of Red Hat Linux (RHL) or Fedora forms the basis for a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, thus:

* Red Hat Linux 6.2 -> Red Hat Linux 6.2E
* Red Hat Linux 7.2 -> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1
* Red Hat Linux 9 -> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
* Fedora Core 3 -> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
* Fedora Core 6 -> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
* Fedora 9 -> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (projected)

IIRC the RHEL (and thus CentOS) branches from Fedora have been from late test versions rather than the final releases. I have had pretty good luck building packages from a Fedora release or 2 later than the branch version on CentOS. My $0.02 is to try the latest SRPM for a particular package that will build successfully, rather than going all the way back to FC3 for EL4-based systems. You will often need to build dependencies from Fedora as well. Probably goes without saying, but check the 3rd party repos first before embarking on custom builds.

http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories

Thanks, that's useful info. I had found the kbs-CentOS-Extras repository, which has a lot of useful stuff, but didn't have libconfuse. I installed the SRPM of libconfuse for FC6, and it built on CentOS4 without any problems (once I had installed check and check-devel from kbs).

Cheers Tony