[CentOS] recommended way to install source rpms?

[Frank Cox]

On Sun, 2010-10-10 at 17:56 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   so, is that reasonable?  to just manually add an extra repo file
> according to that link above (which appears to work perfectly well).

In my opinion, in most cases there is no particularly good reason to
bother compiling a source rpm yourself unless it's something that's not
already in a repository.

If what you need is not in one of the repositories, then my next step is
to either download a src.rpm from somewhere else (fedora, etc.) and see
what it takes to compile that, or download the tar archive and see if I
can find a .spec file somewhere that does something close to what I'm
trying to accomplish.  Sometimes there is an old version or a MDK source
rpm that contains a .spec file that will provide a starting point.  If
not, then if it's not a really complex install you can just copy a spec
file from another not really complex rpm and use that for a framework.

> frankly, the wiki page on downloading from source:
> 
> http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/SourceInstalls
> 
> seems just a touch on the hysterical side. 

Sounds like pretty good advice to me.  I try really hard to install
stuff through rpm's.  The only exception is with single-executable
programs that can just be tossed into /usr/local/bin or ~/bin or
whatever; those are generally programs that I have written myself or
little utilities downloaded from here and there.

If it's a single-executable program without a bunch of support files and
whatnot, and if I'm planning to install it on only one or two computers,
then it's probably not worth the effort to create a rpm for it.
Anything else, is.

-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com