Re: tlug: rpms

["Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com>]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2000, Jonathan Byrne wrote:

> Tarballs, of course, will just let you go ahead and shoot.
> 
> So without discussing security implications like compromised binaries,
> we now see that it's the case that compiling from source is your
> best guarantee that a given package will work on your machine.
> A Red Hat binary will like as not fail to work on TurboLinux
> (non-English TL, especially), but if you build it from source
> by typing RPM --rebuild your.src.rpm.here you may get a usable binary
> RPM out of it.  Not always, but you might.
> 
> My practice is generally not use RPMs, except those that come with
> the distro CD.  I prefer source tarballs, which all get installed
> in /usr/local/.  Makes upgrading or reinstalling your OS pretty 
> painless.

thank you for bringing this up - I was going to do that today if nobody
else did.  /opt is also a good place to put OPTional packages, especially
large unwieldy things like Oracle.  Usually it's good to have your
application/DB servers have /opt on a separate partition/disk in this
case, for this reason.  Better yet, have /opt be a nice 2-terabyte
striped-and-mirrored EMC Symmetrix volume that you access via fibre
channel SCSI.  Sure, that's expensive, but it's pretty neat, too :)

--------------------------
Scott M. Stone, CCNA <sstone@example.com>
UNIX Systems and Network Engineer
Taos - The SysAdmin Company 

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