[Rd] rhel5 rpm spec mods

Ben Walton bwalton at artsci.utoronto.ca
Tue Apr 17 18:44:20 CEST 2007


On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 05:29:31PM +0100, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
+>  >Without modification, rpmbuild was looking for XFree86-devel and gcc-g77
+>  >which aren't valid packages in rhel5 (haven't looked at 4 as rpms were
+>  >already built for that).
+>  
+>  yes and no. You can do "rpmbuild --nodeps <otherstuff>" without
+>  modifying the spec file to tell rpmbuild to go ahead, I think.
+>  This is also often the technique used when one tries to
+>  build rpm's on non-rpm based systems like debian/gentoo/slackware.

That would work, but shouldn't be required, imho.  I sent the patch to
Martyn already, so hopefully it gets included.

+>  >I am aware of fedora extras but haven't gotten to the point of using
+>  >them in rhel (we do in our fc installs).  Personally, I'd prefer to stay
+>  >away from the fc rpm trees when possible as (being a devel distro)
+>  >versions can change wildly and bugs are more likely to crop up in
+>  >packaging, etc (we've been bitten in the past).  I'm moving away from fc
+>  >for production machines for this reason.  I prefer fewer surprises in
+>  >production machines when possible.
+>  
+>  Personally, I think EL4 is too old/conservative (and I don't have access
+>  to EL5), and it makes me angry when I encounter a bug or limitation
+>  that I know was already fixed/addressed a year or two ago. Can't win.
+>  :-).

Yes, EL4 is old and conservative.  EL5 will be the same in short order.
They are also stable and (mostly) surprise free.  I have encountered
bugs that are frustrating due to their age (open nfs locks and crashing
apps springs to mind) but for the most part I like it for my servers
(and lab machines/workstations, etc).  FC has it's (very important)
place and I do suggest that home users work with it (or Ubuntu/Debian).
The other issue with FC in production is the legacy support one.  I
can't be bothered to upgrade machines as often as the fc support cycle
would have me do (I miss fedoralegacy.org already).  I'm not really
saying I personally prefer RedHat, but it does meet a very important
need for me.

Thanks
-Ben
-- 
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer
Office of Planning & IT
Faculty of Arts & Science
University of Toronto
Cell: 416.407.5610

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