Re: compiling from tarballs

[Dave Reed <dreed capital edu>]

> Resent-Cc: 
> MBOX-Line: From gnome-list-request@gnome.org  Fri Dec 31 20:00:32 1999
> From: Todd Wilson <twilson@csufresno.edu>
> 
> Please pardon me if this is a stupid question, but I couldn't find an
> explanation in the FAQ or Getting Started pages.  I have a RH 6.1
> system and have been wanting to use some of the recent releases
> announced on this list -- e.g., gnumeric-0.46.  When I go to the RH
> Package Installation page at www.gnome.org, I find that the version
> there is gnumeric-0.38.  Vaguely remembering it being said that recent
> releases are only available in tarball, I go to the Installation from
> Tarball page, and, indeed, gnumeric-0.46 is there.  When I go to
> install it, I find that I need libglade-0.11.  Fair enough; I download
> and install that first.  When gnumeric's configure complains again
> that my libglade is still too old, I go back and find an instruction
> on the download page that implies that I have to remove the libglade
> package that came with my distribution first.  When I try to do this,
> of course, I get a message about many broken dependencies.
> 
> My question:  Does this mean that I'm basically going to have to
> remove most of my gnome packages, re-install them from tarball, do
> something to my /etc/ld.so.conf, and possibly other stuff just to try
> out one program (gnumeric-0.46)?  Or, possibly, that I'm either going
> to have to go all tarball or all RPM, not a mixture of both?  Is there
> a document that I haven't seen that explains this in some detail (/usr
> vs. /usr/local, gnome-config getting confused, etc.)?


I find the easiest thing to do is put the newer versions in /usr/local
and put /usr/local/bin first in the PATH variable and LD_LIBRARY_PATH
variable so that the configure scripts find the newer version and
older version will still work (no need to remove the older versions).
I'm still running RH 5.2 with the newer versions of gtk/gnome in
/usr/local using this method.

> Related question:  I also vaguely remember it being said that the
> process of producing RPMs from tarballs is not very complicated, but
> that, because developers understandably didn't want to be in the RPM
> business, there was bound to be some lag time before they get produced
> (eight releases worth, in the case of gnumeric).  Is there any reason
> why scripts cannot be written that will create the necessary RPMs
> automatically from the tarballs and place the resulting files in the
> ftp area, so as to eliminate this lag time?  Or, more likely, am I
> completely misunderstanding the situation?

It's just a matter of someone creating the SPEC file for it - I'm not
a RPM expert so I just usually put all things from .tar.gz files in
/usr/local and don't worry if my RPM database isn't upto date for
things that I want newer versions than the distribution includes.

HTH,
Dave