Installation of Tar and development tree rpm packages

[David Curry]

Thanks, Paul.  I suspected that was the case.

Thus far I have not been brave (foolhardy?) enough to try building RPMs 
from source.

Recent exchanges on list, though, have provided enough info to prompt an 
attempt or two.

I gather that the key is lies in assuring that the libraries application 
developers identify as needed to support an application release reside 
somewhere on my system and their location is defined for the rpm build.

Paul Howarth wrote:

>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.
>  
>