Whit Blauvelt wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 08:10:29PM -0500, John R. Dennison wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 08:01:02PM -0400, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>>> That being said, it's trivial to recompile the F13 RPM for 3.1.2 for
>>> centos-5.
>> And that would be the proper route to go instead of building
>> from native source :)
>
> To get 3.1.7? Disregarding that, I should jump through the hoops of
> recompiling a F13 RPM rather than just compile from the tar? Why?
Because rpm tracks all the files installed from packages, and yum understands
the dependencies. You've clearly broken that on your system. And you probably
have no idea how to verify that your tarball-installed files are still the same
ones you installed or how to remove all of them cleanly.
> Every
> extra stage like that introduces the chance of incidental errors, of stuff
> that doesn't translate precisely through that stage. I'm not doubting it
> generally can work, just that there's anything "proper" about it. Generally
> native source is the gold standard. The farther upstream you go, the better
> the quality gets, the more bugs are fixed, and the more control you have
> over how and where the stuff installs on your systems.
There's always a tradeoff between new code introducing new bugs and fixing old
ones. Fedora takes a different position in that tradeoff than RHEL/Centos and
sometimes that's what you want for certain applications. And if the src RPM
will rebuild painlessly you get the advantage of rpm management for next to no
extra work. Plus you know someone else has at least run the code a time or two,
something you don't know about the straight upstream source.
> There can be an argument that for some stuff that passes through RHEL the
> extra attention adds some quality control (ignoring the counterexample of
> the long history of RH manging kernels; they seem to have gotten better
> about that lately), but stuff in EPEL? Really?
One of EPEL's goals is to not overwrite or conflict with any base rpms. They
are't perfect, their idea of 'base' doesn't include centos extras, and their
guidlines keep out some things you probably want, but in general they are pretty
good and it is a very valuable thing to be able to install any of their packages
without worrying about conflicts. Other 3rd party repos don't make the same
effort or intentionally update existing system libraries to meet their own goals.
> I'm not talking Linux from Scratch here - although I respect that project
> immensely. I appreciate a solid distro as a foundation. CentOS is. But
> claims that any distro is so perfect and complete that it's "improper" to
> custom compile a few apps on its foundation - from the "native" source (with
> all the connotations that "natives" are scarey and primitive) - should not
> be well received if we want to continue to have open platforms.
You need to think of rpm as a database with integrity rules - because that's
what it is. And think about what happens if you randomly scribble stuff in a
database ignoring its rules - because that's what you are doing. There are
times you need to do some experimental things, but they should be kept out of
the system area or you loose the advantage that package management tools
provide. Or you should build your own rpms to incorporate the files into the
system properly.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com