URPMI For Fedora Core 2

Jaroslaw Zachwieja writes "Stefan van der Eijk, the autor of Slbd - automated tool to rebuild distributions to different architectures/processors in a sanitized environment, has published set of RPMS of URPMI for Fedora Core 2. The only usage difference is that it uses hdlist instead of compressed hdlist.cz known from Mandrake. Are we one step further towards Cross-distro RPMS?"

Comments

Re:Who needs em?

[ultrabot]

Seriously, is: ./configure
make
make install

Really that hard that we need cross distro RPMS?


configure; make; make install does nothing with dependencies. If you, for example, don't have qt development headers on your machine, it just croaks.

Re:Who needs em?

[RAMMS EIN]

``Seriously, is: ./configure
make
make install

Really that hard that we need cross distro RPMS?''

I hope you don't really think so.

First off, autoconf configure scripts take a long time to run, and if the package is of any complexity, the compilation will also take a long time.

Secondly, all sorts of things go wrong during ./configure. Dependencies can be missing, which you would have to find, fetch, configure, build, and install - manually. Also, configure scripts are usually buggy (omitting necessary checks, and performing many unnecessary ones).

Third, make install is typically run as root. Do you trust the script not to install any trojans? How about ./configure wiping out the files in your home directory? I put more trust in my distributor than in random people who wrote the software. Not even so much that they would put in trojans, but how is the security of their server?

Fourth, software built and installed from source can be a bitch to uninstall. If it installed in its own directory, possibly creating symlinks in /usr/bin et al, this would be easy. As it is, however, they put files all over the place. Good luck figuring out which files belong to the package you want to remove.

Fifth, packages often need some tailoring to fit in well with your distribution (think menu entries, file locations, etc.) With prepackaged software, this has been done for you.

All in all, a good package manager beats compiling from source any day. Debian's package management tools are very very good, and the reason I prefer Debian over any other distro. They resolve dependencies automagically (which RPM-based distro's are finally beginning to get working), and if you want, you can build the package from source with all the tweaks you want.