Carl wrote regarding 'Re: [SLE] new rpm, old SuSE?' on Sat, Aug 28 at 23:39:
On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 13:34, Danny Sauer wrote:
Does anyone have any hints for me on compiling (or obtaining a binary, in the unlikely event one's available) rpm 4.2 on a SuSE 7.1 system? I've got this old system running (actually, two of them), and I'd like to be able to use newer source rpms. Unfortunately, the .spec files with newer packages generally make rpm3 barf.
I've got the package from ftp.rpm.org, but it's not building on my system. It tries to use its own internal libelf, and that just doesn't build for whatever reason. The ./configure doesn't appear to provide the 'use the libelf on this system, it's up to date and works fine, you stupid idiot program' option, unfortunately. If it did, I'd set that flag and be on my way.
What about 7.3 or 8.2 . I have 9.1 running on a PII. I could you burn you copies of those older versions. I think the 7.3 is personal and the 8.2 is pro.
If I was gonna update the whole system, I'd do it with 9.1. However, the important parts of the system (kernel, apache, openLDAP, and postfix) are all installed from tarballs and kept up-to-date that way. Sometimes I get tired of waiting for SuSE to release new versions that contain features or bugfixes that I want. :) Anyway, it'd be a pain to move the config files and data to a new system, so I'm hoping to keep the other "ancilary" parts updated using source packages from newer systems. That means that I need to update rpm to rebuild the packages, or spend lots of time editing spec files back down to a 3.x-compatible syntax. Or maintain everything from tarballs, but that'd be annoying. :) Anyway, I appreciate the offer, but you don't need to do that. The 7.x series packages are all available at ftp.suse.com in the "discontinued" directory, and the 8.x stuff's up in the normal place. Furthermore, the versions up to 8.2 all used RPM 3.0.2 (which, I guess, means I should be able to build security updates from SuSE 8.2). This problem building libelf is really annoying me... Thanks again for the offer. --Danny