[Cialug] CentOS Yum error

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Zachary Kotlarek <zach at kotlarek.com> wrote:
>
> That's what the makefiles are for -- they store your compile-configuration
> and do any necessary pre-compile checks. And if you want really want to copy
> between systems rather than compile most packages are trivial to install
> with a DEST_DIR or simialr parameter, allowing you to make clean tarballs of
> the output.

Hey, you know what?  That's exactly what a .spec file (the input to
the rpmbuild process) is.  It's a little "recipie" for building
software from source.

> It's like a packaging system, but you're responsible for you own dependency
> checks.

I read that as "It's like a packaging system, but you have to do all
the work yourself."  No thanks, that's what computers are for.

> It's a little more setup work when you first fetch a package, but
> I've never had to uninstall and re-install RPMs or rebuild and verify a DB
> just because the package manager it too lazy to actually check for the
> specific features it needs instead of some arbitrary list of "dependencies".

Checking for features like the way autoconf does is error prone and
difficult to handle.  I don't know how many times I've given up on a
piece of software because the authors expected a library installed in
someplace other than where I had it installed and I didn't want to
fight their build system.  Package managers use databases of
dependencies to make dependency checking more reliable and repeatable.
 Sure, you can easily break it if you do something stupid.

> Building everything from source is also very handy if you have to maintain
> systems other than x86, where RPMs are often not available, or not available
> until weeks or months after the x86 version.

Making RPMs is easy, so if you can't find one for your architecture
it's pretty simple to build it yourself.

> I'm not saying there's no place for package managers. I'm often too lazy to
> build an inventory when I install new things, which make un-installation a
> hassle, and a package manager would fix that. And if you want to install
> gnome or some other huge set of packages it's nice to compile once on your
> fast machine and never again anywhere else.

You must have a different definition of lazy than I do.  I've never
compiled gnome for myself and I stopped compiling custom kernels long
ago.  I have better things to do.

> But every package manager I've seen does dependency checks against their own
> DB of which packages are installed and what's in each package, rather than
> checking for available functionality. And for large packages I'd often
> rather install with less functionality than with two dozen dependencies for
> features I won't use, which is hard to accommodate with a package manager,
> particularly if the program in question wasn't written to provide optional
> features in dynamically loaded libraries. So until and unless someone writes
> a package manager that is a tool to manage installations the way I'd like
> instead of an electronic bureaucracy that demands I work they way it likes,
> I'm probably just going to roll my own.

Sounds like gentoo is the distribution for you...

Jeff