Re: This sucks

[jgotts linuxsavvy com]

In message <20010716023705 B2376 blitzkrieg battleship>, "Guillermo S. Romero /
 Familia Romero" writes:

>kalmite cubenet plus com (2001-07-15 at 2339.51 +0100):
>> There are no tarballs availabe on the Xiamin ftp server... all the
>source is in packaged with the distro's packaging tool.  [see my
>messages earlier this month] Appearantly any of those source packages
>could be built on any machine running any distro, but I don't like
>it.... if they can be built on any system, then why aren't they
>tarballs.  This is my biggest problem with Xiamin.  I don't want to
>waste the small amount of bandwidth I have (33.6 modem) on downloading
>something I might not be able to build.

>Try getting one, only one and non important package, then disassemble
>it (extract the tgz) and see if it builds or not in you machine. If
>you get RPMs, you will only get some extra headers, not much more.
>Also, you can get Debian tgz, from Ximian or official Debian, I have
>done sometimes to get software I wanted or to check source. I think I
>did not explained right the thing about Debian, by definition, source
>packages in Debian are not like RPM (.srpm.rpm), but a tgz and some
>extra files that convert the plain tgz in a Debian friendly package.

If source RPM's are available, you can easily see what's going on by using
rpm2cpio:

rpm2cpio <filename>.src.rpm | cpio --extract

The only tricky thing is learning how to read spec files.

John

P.S. As an aside, I've checked in a number of fixes to spec files so if you
have RPM, getting GNOME going from source isn't too bad.  (Of course I don't
have an infinite supply of time to always check in my local changes.)

-- 
John GOTTS <jgotts linuxsavvy com>  http://linuxsavvy.com/staff/jgotts