Something I'd not noticed till now...
Most of the GNOME project's software comes with a packagename.spec file in
the main tarfile. I'd thought it was just a description file. It's not.
If it's there, and you use RPM for your package manager, you can just do:
rpm -ta packagename.tar.gz
rpm -ivh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/glade-0.5.1-SNAP.i386.rpm
It'll look for the spec file, compile it, install it & update the package
database. Kick ass. OK, so sometimes (like the glade 0.5.1 snapshot), the
spec file isn't updated (it says 0.5.0, so rpm looks for a file
glade-0.5.0.tar.gz after getting a specfile from glade-0.5.1.tar.gz), but
it's a nice little thing, for those, like me, that like to keep things in
order.
BTW, for those tight on disk space, it keeps the RPMs in
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/${PLAT}, all the sources in /usr/src/redhat/BUILD and
the SRPM in /usr/src/redhat/SRPMS. You can do something like
rpm -ta --clean --rmsource packagename.tar.gz
And that will get rid of most stuff out of in /usr/src/redhat afterwards.
Cool no ?
Kate
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