On Monday 12 May 2003 23:21, Paul Conn wrote:
On Mon, 12 May 2003 19:41:37 -0700 Curtis Rey <crrey@charter.net> wrote:
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It makes maintaining non-SuSE specific software a breeze. All the advantages of your own configure plus rpm management. BTW, I usually run SuSEconfig manually after such an install, for good order.
Paul.
Cool, I do remember hearing about this. Also, is the KRPMbuilder a front end for this. I was giving it a look and some pre-defined arguments (fill in the spaces). Are you or anyone else aware of this program and have any opinion one way or the other?
The checkinstall sounds very handy though. I have done many tarballs and am faily comfortable with them. I guess what your saying config make to get things straight, deps, paths, etc.. and the run check install - I'll have a look at the man pages.
Cheers, Curtis.
Hi Curtis,
No KRPMbuilder is a serarate program altogether. It is a developer tool for creating rpm's from spec files and all that stuff; sorry I'm not a developer so the terminology eludes me. But it has nothing to do with checkinstall.
I noticed elsewhere in this thread that you received cautionary advice about if checkinstall goes wrong. That is correct but please don't let that stop you trying it. IMO you can mess up an install in a number of ways and retrieving things can be messy. I always do an essential files backup before I install any new software (particularly non-SuSE specific), so it's fairly safe. BTW, you can always get help on here! :-)
Checkinstall just makes life so much easier when installing tarballs and tarballs make it so much easier to make sure files end up where you want them. It is however just an executable script. It resides in /usr/sbin/checkinstall when installed (so is not in ordinary users path). Have a look at it. I actually edited it because I noticed that when it did the rpm install it used the 'force' option. I don't like using that option at any time so I changed it to -Uvh. It all worked ok still.
It may not help with this Zinf stuff but definitely give it a go if you install from tarballs.
Good luck, Paul.
Thanks Paul. I have no real quams about taking chances, since this is a one user machine. I don't like to have to redo things though and I'm always trying to be smart instead of just busy. I think I'll do that (run a couple of tarballs through checkinstall) because I get a little tired of hunting down stuff from tarballs in my sys, but use them a fair amount because many of the programs I like are in that form. Cheers, Curtis. :)