[CentOS] program in centos rpm

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Frank Cox <theatre at sasktel.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Nov 2010 08:01:45 -0800 (PST)
> ann kok wrote:
>
>> 1/ How can I get this program install if yum won't find it?
>
> Generally speaking it's best to stick with rpm installs on a Centos system but
> if something consists of, for example, one single executable file, then you can
> just copy that anywhere that's convenient and run it from there.  (Put it
> in /usr/local/bin if you want multiple users to have access to it, put it into
> ~/bin if you just want to use it yourself.  That way it's on your default path.)
>
>> 2/ Can I use fedora12 fping rpm to install on it?
>
> Some Fedora srpms can be recompiled for Centos.  Sometimes it's a simple matter
> of "rpmbuild --rebuild whatever.srpm", sometimes you have to edit the .spec
> file to make it work.  And sometimes it doesn't work at all, depending on other
> factors like dependencies.

It's not as easy as one might hope: There are new guidelins for
writing Fedora RPM's, such as the use of '%global' instead of
'%define', that can be very confusing.

Also, the SRPM's from RHEL 6 and from Fedora 14 often have a 'docs'
package that is compiled with the "BuildArch: noarch" option, which
breaks the living tar out of compiling it unde CentOS 5.x or RHEL 5.x
due to scattered debugifo debris which is not correctly bundled.