[wplug] Building vs. RPMs?

[Jonathan Billings]

On Jan 19, 2006, at 9:56 PM, Douglas Green wrote:

> Is there any performance advantage to building a package from  
> source rather than installing a precompiled binary or RPM? In other  
> words- is the package somehow more tailored to my system (and it's  
> various dependencies)?? My Googling didn't yield a good yes/no  
> answer. RPMs seem to land me in dependency hell pretty often...
> Thanks,
> -D

I often build my own RPMs, largely because I have an amd64 CPU and I  
like to use the RPM packaging system to manage my programs.  I build  
firefox and thunderbird as amd64 apps for my fedora core 4 system,  
for example.

You'd be surprised by how many open source packages come with a spec  
file, so if it isn't part of Fedora's distribution, you can often  
still build an RPM for it without much effort.  Unfortunately, a lot  
the time you have to hack the specfile because the person who wrote  
it doesn't really understand how to write them, or wrote them for an  
outdated or alternative RPM-based distro.

One of the things I definitely recommend is to install Fedora's  
fedora-rpmdevtools package.  You can then build the packages as a  
normal user.  It'll create the appropriate ~/rpmbuild directory, as  
well as a ~/.rpmmacros file.  You can add specific optimizations to  
your ~/.rpmmacros file.  If you want to see what macros you have  
already, try running 'rpmbuild --showrc' (lots of info, might want to  
pipe it into a pager).

Notes:
RPM SPEC files for building mozilla: http://fedoranews.org/tchung/ 
firefox/
How to set up your RPM build directory: http://fedoranews.org/tchung/ 
rpmbuild/

--
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>