Mark Hounschell wrote:
According the the LSB/LFS anything installed onto the machine that did not come with the distribution should be installed into /usr/local. This is supposed to guarantee that any subsequent updates do not overwrite any externally added software. Any update procedure is supposed to be sure that if the word local is in the path of a file then it is off limits. So any rpm you wanted to build that is not part of the distrubtion does not need to be suse specific. It should really be an rpm that could be installed on ANY linux box without having to worry about the distribution. This makes building an rpm much easier and you do not need Len's procedure to build an rpm that will work and be LSB compliant. In fact I beleive you are looking for trouble trying to make a so called "SuSE-compatable RPM" unless you are trying to help SuSE in some way. Your better off just building your basic rpm that installs into /usr/local. I do it just to try to maintain the rpm database. It's really not neccassary to be SuSE specific. What if you (god forbid) decided to change distributions? All that work you did may be for naught. Just my opinion..
There are really two cases: packages that don't exist in the SuSE distribution at all and packages that are newer versions of material in the SuSE distribution. It's the latter ones that are the more interesting issue -- for example, the latest version of QT, which if I remember right is v2.3.1. Paul