fun with rpm manipulation

[Chris Mayes <cmayes frognet net>]

After spening much time wrestling with compiling and installing the
tarballs, I find out that there's a much cleaner way of doing things.  I
don't remember who mentioned the rpm -tb switch, but it is such a nice
feature!  Now, I am working on upgrading and installing on a machine at
work using this totally neat approach.  However, after doing this for a
couple of hours, I have formulated a couple of questions:

-Do people try to compile the rpm -tb stuff before they release them?
I've compiled two tarballs in this manner and have found that both needed
modification.  The glib package was looking for 1.1 libraries instead of
1.2, and gtk+ was doing something similar, plus there were two query lines
that were aparrently messed up.  One had an extra space behind it, and
another had a + before the install query rather than a %.  I've just fixed
that stuff, and am crossing my fingers that it will work.  If this stuff
is not being checked, I'll volunteer to make sure that they are ;-)
Actually, since they have a "SNAP" postfix to the rpm, I assume that they
are CVS snapshots and are not actually intended for general use?  Perhaps
this is another missed change in the spec file?  The more I learn about
how rpms work, the more fun I find them, especially since I can now (sort
of) build my own ;-)  

- A more general question: when does one install an rpm instead of
upgrading, and vice versa?  When I upgraded my slang library (for jed), I
upgraded the library despite warnings not to.  This broke a number of
things, and making a symlink to the new libraries only made the programs
(lynx being one of them) to break when evaluating the library.  Then, I
reinstalled the old library, which seemed to coexist peacefully with the
new one.  Now everything seems to be working in a harmonoius fashion.  

Another thing to note is when I tried to install the old devel of slang
next to the new one, they conflicted, so I left the old one out.  But the
two gtk+ devels (the new one just finished compiling ;-)) seem to be
harmonious.  So, my short question is, do I try to install, and barring
that, upgrade?  

I must say that I find rpms to be a pretty cool idea, especially now that
I've found that I can have both the optimization of a source tarball (or
source rpm, now that I know how to use them) and the
organizational/upgrading convenience of an rpm.  I still have much to
learn, so I was wondering if anyone knew of where I could find more
comprehensive info on building and modifying rpms and .spec files.  I know
about the Maximum RPM book, which I assume does a pretty thorough job of
covering the subject, but since I am a mere college student, I don't
presently have the capital for the book.  Thanks!

-Chris

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