On Sunday 15 May 2005 06:16, Randall R Schulz wrote:

If one simply downloads a source RPM from SuSE and rebuilds it without changing the spec file, won't they get a new binary RPM that is essentially identical? It might have some different time stamps and perhaps the build environment difference might produce some small discrepancies, but if it builds successfully, will it not be for all practical purposes the same binary RPM?

Maybe. The discrepancies can be huge. For example, a lot of programs detect at compile time which packages are available, and compiled in support for various things depending on what it finds. So for example if you don't have libmpeg installed you might compile a xine that can't play mpegs (not sure if this would actually compile without it, it's just an illustrative example) You could have upgraded libraries, for example libstdc++, in which case the original rpm mightn't run but the recompiled one will. And the default rpm scripts won't strip your binaries, while all suse's binaries are stripped (versions that have debug information still in them are currently on the ftp server), so the ones you compile will be orders of magnitude larger unless you do something about it And you can compile for a different target without changing the spec file, by passing the parameter --target= to rpmbuild There are other aspects too.