Installation of RPM's beyond standard Fedora Core 2

[Scot L. Harris]

On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 07:05, Fons van der Beek wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was googling my way in finding an howto "howto install mysql 4.0 on fedora
> core 2", I just found an Italian
> website describing this installation, unfortunalty my Italian is not that
> good. I followed this mailinglist and I can
> totaly imagine why redhat bundles with 3.58, no problem....
> 
> But I guess I'am not the onlye one who wants a clean valid installation of
> Mysql 4 by rebuilding the source rpm's and a valid integration into Fedora,
> with valid dependencies.
> Or is this not possible and should I install the software from source (just
> as php, apache and so on?)
> 
> Thanks in advance..
> Fons van der Beek

In the last few months I have come to the opinion that in a production
environment I prefer to build the major packages being used from
source.  By doing so I am able to free my self from depending on someone
else producing an rpm package for the particular OS I am using.  In my
case I have several RH8 systems which had very old postgresql, apache,
and php installations.  Because features in the newer versions of these
packages would be helpful to the project it became necessary to build
those packages from source.  Now that I have done that I can build this
environment on pretty much any OS and get the results I want.  (will be
building a new system today with that environment).  And I figure over
the next year or two when new versions of these packages come out I will
be able to adopt them more quickly and easier than if I had to wait on
an RPM.  And in the case of systems that are getting old the rpms may
never arrive.

I like the idea of using rpms and letting yum sort out the dependencies
for me.  And I will use them for other lesser packages, but for the
major applications I believe now that building from source is a better
way to do it.

Remember this is just my current opinion, your preferred approach may
differ greatly.   

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

Better hope you get what you want before you stop wanting it.