Installation of Tar and development tree rpm packages

[Paul Howarth]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 14:08 -0500, David Curry wrote:
> Thx to Erik Olsen and all respondents to his question about installation 
> of updates application packages currently available only in tar format. 
>   Very informative and useful.
> 
> Rahul Sundaram's response (shown below) raised additonal questions I 
> hope some on the list will address.
> 
> As I currently understand fedora processes and structure, development 
> tree are primarily (solely?) oriented toward the latest official core 
> release (FC3) and the forthcoming official core release (FC4).  Are some 
>   development tree packages directly useable on up-to-date FC2 and/or 
> FC1 systems as well?
> 
> I am primarily interested in open source desktop/productivity 
> applications such as abiword, OpenOffice.org, Gnumeric, Mysql, firefox, 
> thunderbird, etc. if that is a relevant factor.

Binary RPMs pulled from the development tree will very likely have
dependencies that can't be satisfied without installing a bunch of new
libraries. Sometimes (e.g. with a big GUI app like evolution) the system
you'd be left with would be as close to the development tree as it was
to the system you started with, with all the problems that that would
bring. What sometimes works though is to build the RPM from source on
the target system, which will result in a package linked against the
original system's libraries, hence less of a change. This doesn't always
work though, as there may be specific library requirements that would
force you to upgrade some libraries before you could build or run a
package. So it depends on how much you want the upgraded version of your
app and how much trouble you're prepared to go to to get it installed.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>