okay, thank you for the careful and detailed explanation, sandra. hmm.. i guess "i wish" there were a simple/easy way to register certain files from (a vendor's) tarball with one's own rpm db, without making a separate rpm for a vendor's stuff.. but maybe this goes against the whole design of rpm.. anyway, thank you, this does make sense. i just ended up putting 'AutoReq: no' in the php.spec file in the section for the php-interbase subpackage. i also followed panu's advice and ran 'yum clean all' (see my response to his post, as well).
