Software Install Best Practice?

[Jay Levitt]

Danny Howard wrote:
> Ah, okay, I have an answer here ...
>
> http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/FAQ.php#B5
>
> Summary:
> Edit /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources and add:
> yum dag http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el3/en/i386/dag
> up2date <package>
>
> Thanks, guys.
>   
Hey, that's really good stuff.  A related question, from a developer 
who's masquerading as a sysadmin:

I presume up2date still maintains the dependency relationships if I 
install from a third-party repository like that.  But what's the best 
practice for replacing RPM software with source-built versions?  There 
will always be some RHEL packages that become out of date, and yet 
aren't replaced by third-party repositories.  And from what I've read, 
installing Fedora packages on RHEL is a hit-or-miss proposition.

For instance, RHEL4 uses GTK 2.4.  I've got some apps that need new 
features in GTK2.6 or 2.8, and these aren't in the above-mentioned 
dag/rpmforge repository, so I need to build them myself.  Ditto 
subversion, httpd, etc.  Over time, the configuration is bound to 
deviate more and more from stock.

In the past, on my home Mandrake machine, I've always just installed the 
source versions right over the top of the RPMs.  But obviously that gets 
you into trouble over time, as up2date tries to install security patches 
of the base versions over your now-home-built libraries.  This could 
possibly explain why nothing works on my Mandrake box anymore.

Yet I can't easily uninstall gtk, because it's got a zillion packages 
that depend on it.  And yet I'm not really uninstalling it; I just want 
to upgrade it. 

For each source-built item, I could figure out the corresponding Red Hat 
package, and add to the up2date skip-list, but that seems to get ignored 
at the RHN web site, and possibly some other place that I now forget.  
And that's not totally useful, because it might lead to an apparent 
dependency that doesn't exist; some future (third-party) rpm might 
depend on GTK 2.6, which I have, but which up2date doesn't know I have! 

Or I could uninstall it --nodeps, but again, that messes up the 
dependency tracking.  Is there a better way?

Jay Levitt