On Sat, Mar 10, 2007 at 10:08:06AM +0100, Tony Earnshaw wrote:
Installing from packages where details of all packages are kept in a database gives gives many huge advantages, this is recognized by most, if not all, major OS vendors. I, too, was once too lazy (or ignorant) to learn to build my own program packages where I couldn't beg, borrow or steal others'. Well, now I can.
If anybody wants to build rpms easier from sources, get mezzanine and specgen (included in mezzanine). You can either do it locally or with a VC backend (version control, ala cvs or svn) to manage your versions that mezzanine will build. It takes a few hours of playing with it to understand the process, but the advantages are HUGE. The lead developer of mezzanine has two really nice writeups on it here: http://beta.kainx.org/articles/index.php