[wplug] Building vs. RPMs?

[Patrick Wagstrom]

On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 16:16 -0500, Joe Gallo wrote:
> Another benefit of compiling from source is being able to specify how
> a package should be built, or what support should be built in.
> 
> An example would be whether to enable X, or gtk, or gtk2, whether to
> support samba, or qt, etc.  This is auotmated in Gentoo with use
> flags, and can help cut the dependencies of a package.  (If I don't
> compile it with support for gtk, then it no longer depends on gtk,
> etc). 
> 
> Also, my system is *so* much faster.  I can smell the rice burning
> from here, over ssh.  : )

It's a little known fact that you can actually make your own RPM files
pretty easily, and the spec file format is straightforward to modify.
Going this route preserves vendor patches that may be applied to
packages for interoperability.

Here's what you do:

download .src.rpm file
rpm -Uvh said file
cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
edit the spec file for the package, changing options it calls to config,
optimizations, etc
rpmbuild -ba SPECFILE
then rpm -Uvh the new RPM in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/YOUR_ARCH

The downside of this is that you need the -devel packages installed,
which you need for building from source.  The upside is that it
preserves vendor modifications and makes it easy to remove the package
at a later date.

--Patrick