DBA wrote:
Howzit Folks?
As a relative newbie I'd like to know what the best practice/process is for managing the installation of software from source. I often find that there is software available which is not supported by SUSE which is useful to me and hence my enquiry.
The key aspects I'm interested in are:
1. Cataloguing this software 2. How do I trial software? 3. How do I update software? 4. How do I uninstall software?
Is there software available which will do this or assist in doing it? I'm currently looking at the stow package to see if that will do the trick but it looks like a very manual process. One of the solutions I was considering is building my own RPMs from the source, that way I can manage everything via Yast which has all the tools that I mentioned above and more. What is the learning curve like to learn to build RPMs?
I'd appreciate it if you have the time to share your experience.
Cheers Bruce
Most of the time I use checkinstall as at times the RPM's are either not
available or are not the latest available versions. This does not sit
well with people who abhor using leading edge, but at times the
available RPM's lack some funtionality needed. A case in point -- I've
had problems with traceroute sessions kicked off by skype that were
consuming 99% CPU and the problem was due to the way down-level
traceroute SuSE offers in 9.3 (in 10.0 also I've learned), not only does
it consume almost all CPU at the expense of everything else running, it
does not work and never ends. Today I've downloaded and installed the
latest available traceroute source which works fine, so my next task is
to see if I can integrate it into the SuSE net-tools source rpm.
With checkinstall, the generated RPM allows you to upgrade "rpm -Uvh