[CentOS] recommended way to install source rpms?

[R P Herrold]

On Sun, 10 Oct 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

> so, these days, is that the canonical way to download source rpms?

I am substantially certain we have a wiki article on 
mirroring, and certainly I've written about mirroring over and 
over again from many approaches [my most recent blog post, 
aggregated by http://planet.centos.org/ has a recap at the 
bottom of some of those articles].  wget, lftp, and lynx all 
work fine.  Of course RPM itself is a fine retrieval tool as 
well and has been __forever__

>  so, is that reasonable?  to just manually add an extra repo file
> according to that link above (which appears to work perfectly well).

It is reasonable only if the user also has the willingness and 
skills to self-support.  We don't (and cannot) support what we 
dont ship

> frankly, the wiki page on downloading from source:
>
> http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/SourceInstalls
>
> seems just a touch on the hysterical side.  i don't disagree that
> installing packages from the source rpm is probably a questionable
> idea.  but that doesn't justify simply not explaining how to do it
> easily.

"Here is a gun, and bullets.  Leave it unloaded and in a 
locked case"   and it is perfectly harmless

Add another random 'find' and 'great tip to stop RPM from 
carping about dependencies'with the "--nodeps", and BANG, your 
system is dead.  It is all CentOS and RPM's fault, of course - 
"dependency hell, don't you know"

Yeah -- I know where I am going to send support load, going 
forward, who is not so hysterical

WHAT? you don't want to handle that load RIGHT NOT and for 
FREE, and on a newbies mis- and partial-information?   hunh

-- Russ herrold