Re: [gnome-core-1.0.39-10] Daily Crashes

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sat, Sep 02, 2000 at 05:21:15AM -0400 or thereabouts, John Bacalle wrote:
> > to go to the trouble of downloading and building the latest
> > tarballs (GNOME tarballs build as RPMs, you just have to use
> > the "rpm -tb" command) this is probably the easiest way to
> > upgrade.
> 
> I'm not sure I get this portion. Taking a tarball and applying that
> command spits out an RPM?

Assuming there's a valid specfile in the rpm, yes. Very handy.

> I see this,
>   rpm [-b|t] [package_spec]+
>   rpm [--tarbuild] [tarredsource]+

>From the man page? As ever, the docs are the last thing to be updated,
but "rpm --help | more" shows this:

    -b<stage> <spec>      
    -t<stage> <tarball>    - build package, where <stage> is one of:
          p                - prep (unpack sources and apply patches)
          l                - list check (do some cursory checks on %files)
          c                - compile (prep and compile)
          i                - install (prep, compile, install)
          b                - binary package (prep, compile, install, package)
          a                - bin/src package (prep, compile, install, package)

> But not that '-tb' command.

There you go.

I actually use rpm -ta, because -- well, I dunno. Just because it's
what I learned first, I suspect. :)

When the gnome-core and gnome-applets 1.1 series was coming out, I
was cheerfully running that on them, because it made it _so_ much
easier to remove old versions tidily when new versions came out.

To bring it vaguely back on-topic, I did put some stuff about 
building rpms from tarballs into the GNOME Users FAQ. It's in
http://www.linux.org.uk/~telsa/GDP/gnome-faq/compiling.html and
there's some stuff about what to do if you have a tarball and a
separate specfile (at the time it was fairly common for people
to post tweaked specfiles which worked better to here or gnotices).

Telsa