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Re: SlakWare or RedHat?



Amos Shapira writes:
 > "Vadik V. Vygonets" <vadik@arbornet.org> wrote:
 > |On Tue, 8 Oct 1996, Ira Abramov wrote:

<snip>

 > |
 > |> - most of RedHat's installation IS GPLed, the tools are freely available
 > |> and reusable, and you can have it for free, the official version costs
 > |> more but also contains valueable commercial products(!).
 > |
 > |Can you get the sources of the packages you get?  (not the .tar.gz of the
 > |program, but the source of .rpm).  Well, you can get a source of .deb
 > |files in "[un]stable/sources".  BTW, stable and unstalbe are symbolic
 > |links to another directory, for example, "stable" now is a link to "rex",
 > |it seems.
 > 
 > See above for corrections.  Dunno if you can get sources to RPM's but
 > then, why should you?

AFAIK, all RPMs have corresponding source RPMs.  For example, in the
distribution directories, there are 2 subdirectories - RPM and SRPM.
In the contrib & update directories there usually appear both the
source RPM and the binary RPM.

The source RPMS consist of the original packages (i.e. - the standard
tar.gz source code you'd pick up on the net), as well as scripts for
building the package, which include the commands to run as well as
patches to apply (if necessary).

The rpm program can install binary RPMs as well as source RPMs.  With
the source RPMs, installing them consists of unpacking them into the
/usr/src/redhat hierarchy.  The original source packages go into
/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES.  The spec file for building them go into
.../SPECS.  

You can then use the command:

   rpm -b<stage> foo.spec

(with <stage> set appropriately) to unpack the original source code
into a subdirectory of /usr/src/redhat/BUILD, configure it, compile
it, build a binary RPM, and install the binary RPM.

And, btw, redhat now includes package dependencies.  I'm not yet very
familiar with how they work, though...

-- 
Dr. Harvey J. Stein
Berger Financial Research
abel@netvision.net.il


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