On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 02:18:36PM +0700, Philippe wrote:
> They have the Gimp-1.3.18 rpm, but they write "PLD distribution", which
> is something from Polonia.
>
> Any advise, any risk to install it on RH9 ?
When using RPMs from another distribution, you almost certainly want to
build them from source, so you should read up on building RPMS, and grab
the .src.rpm.
Once you install the SRPM in the build area, you have to address several
issues in the .spec file:
1. Package dependencies. Distros use different names
for the same upstream package. E.g., PLD has for a while had
a strict policy of separating out libraries into lib* subpackages.
You want to avoid replacing packages on your system that have dependents,
unless you are replacing them too.
I don't know of a clean way to do that; a quick and dirty first order
test is to do "rpm --test -e <name>", but that is not the whole story.
2. Macro conventions. Distros use different macros in their spec files.
PLD uses _tmpdir in specifying the BuildRoot, whereas the others use
_tmppath. (See the PLD site for the justification.) Mandrake uses %make.
You can work around these by defining compatibility macros in your
~/.rpmmacros file if you are packaging only for yourself. If you intend
to redistribute the packages, you are better off converting the spec file
to the conventions used by your distro, so others can rebuild it easily.
3. Menu structure. Distros have different menu structures, and helper
macros/programs for managing them.
4. Occassionally, a contributed package will not build as non-root in
a buildroot. You can try fakeroot if it is just broken by an instance
of "install -u foo -g bar" in some Makefile. In general, packages
should build as non-root; if they don't, it's a bug in the packaging.
There's a lot of great work in PLD and Mandrake Cooker/Contrib that is
unfortunately not directly usable on Red Hat installs. If you choose to
rework the spec file, I'd recommend reading the packaging guidelines at
fedora.us and freshrpms.net. If you are ambitious, you can maintain the
package to Fedora -- see the website for details.
Regards,
Bill Rugolsky
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