[Cialug] CentOS Yum error

[Zachary Kotlarek]

On Aug 12, 2008, at 2:54 PM, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 2:46 PM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org>  
> wrote:
>>
>> It will pay off in spades if you bite the bullet and get comfortable
>> with your package manager's build capability (i.e. rpmbuild) for
>> creating the packages you want and need.
>
> Packaging software also pays off in repeatability.  Manually compiling
> software is fine for one or two systems, but for building multiple
> systems that need near-identical configurations that you can trust to
> be correct packaging is the way to go.  There's nothing like wasting a
> few hours getting some software to work only to realize that some
> library got built without feature X because you didn't install library
> Y's headers in the right location.

That's what the makefiles are for -- they store your compile- 
configuration and do any necessary pre-compile checks. And if you want  
really want to copy between systems rather than compile most packages  
are trivial to install with a DEST_DIR or simialr parameter, allowing  
you to make clean tarballs of the output.

It's like a packaging system, but you're responsible for you own  
dependency checks. It's a little more setup work when you first fetch  
a package, but I've never had to uninstall and re-install RPMs or  
rebuild and verify a DB just because the package manager it too lazy  
to actually check for the specific features it needs instead of some  
arbitrary list of "dependencies". Building everything from source is  
also very handy if you have to maintain systems other than x86, where  
RPMs are often not available, or not available until weeks or months  
after the x86 version.

I'm not saying there's no place for package managers. I'm often too  
lazy to build an inventory when I install new things, which make un- 
installation a hassle, and a package manager would fix that. And if  
you want to install gnome or some other huge set of packages it's nice  
to compile once on your fast machine and never again anywhere else.

But every package manager I've seen does dependency checks against  
their own DB of which packages are installed and what's in each  
package, rather than checking for available functionality. And for  
large packages I'd often rather install with less functionality than  
with two dozen dependencies for features I won't use, which is hard to  
accommodate with a package manager, particularly if the program in  
question wasn't written to provide optional features in dynamically  
loaded libraries. So until and unless someone writes a package manager  
that is a tool to manage installations the way I'd like instead of an  
electronic bureaucracy that demands I work they way it likes, I'm  
probably just going to roll my own.

	Zach

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