binary rpm repos?

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

On Mar 7, 2009, at 10:49 PM, Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

> It turns out RPM works fine on Mac:

Nice to know. Please take my comments as they are intended. To shed a  
little light on why some people may the time it takes to compile worth  
it. In my experience it's rarely performance optimization. It's  
usually feature set.

RPM is a packaging system so what really matters is how well it's rpm  
packages work for you.

> http://rpm4darwin.sourceforge.net/
>
> -- why not have reference binaries for all ports in RPM format, to
> avoid endless recompiling if you don't have to?

Why don't you compile them for us?
Sounds like a good job for the remainder of the year. Compile all  
those ports for each supported arch and by the time your done you can  
start working on the ones that had updates while you were working on  
the first round.

> Watching gobs of
> compiler output fly by doesn't make one a Unix expert, in the immortal
> words of the funroll-loops.info of the "Gentoo is Rice" fame.  Yeah,
> yeah, it depends on what you have -- but look, Red Hat does it!

Just finished putting in 9.5 hr's on rhel that should have been 4 to 6  
hr's. The RedHat rpm's for bind9 were to old for me to use.
Ended up hunting all over to find a newer source rpm and compiled that.

First I tried just downloading bind9 sources and compiling those but  
RedHat openssl was to out dated to work with the bind9 features I  
required.

My experience with binary distributions is fewer updates, meaning  
older versions of software. With a source distribution, if all you  
have to do is change the build instructions and hand out 2k files for  
download you more inclined to keep your distribution current then if  
you have to compile those upgrades for all supported archs.

Another important consideration for many are the options that are  
compiled into the software. This might not matter to many users but I  
often need features that are not normally compiled into binary  
distributions.

Just look at Apples php as an example. Even macports php is missing a  
few things I like to have, like ming, but at least it's easy enough to  
edit the Portfile to add ming support with macports still handling of  
all the other dependancies including ming. Yah man. That's cool.

So back to RedHat, the bind9 rpm source I found to compile and replace  
the outdated RedHat bind9 rpm did have dlz-mysql configured. It also  
had dlz-postgres, dlz-ldap, dlz-bdb, etc... none of which I wanted.

See, there are always trade offs. Compiling takes time but if it  
didn't have some advantages it wouldn't exist as a way of distributing  
software.

If you want desktop stuff I think your right on the money for most  
people. But I find it painful to try to work with binary package  
managers for servers.

Fink has been around a long time and when I used it in the past I  
thought it was pretty good. Have you tried it lately?
I haven't but you might want to check it out.

What in the world am I doing going on and on about this. I guess it's  
because I had so much fun on RedHat the other day :)

Oh well, I'll be embarrassed tomorrow when I read my own post :)


//Brad