Posted by J.O. Aho on 03/11/07 13:53

JM wrote:
> J.O. Aho wrote:

>> I can't say what the policy is for Scientific Linux about backporting,
>> but on most other distros they only backport security patches and not
>> add on new features to older versions of programs. If you need a new
>> feature, then it's better to upgrade to the new version.
>>
>
> Scientif linux 4 equals RHEL 4 minus somethings and plus somethings
> (like apt-get).

I thought i was part of RHEL, there was already an unofficial version when I
used RH7.3 and as I have understood it has been included into Fedora, which is
the development platform for RHEL.


> Don't think that is possible with scientific linux and red hat without
> manually installing new version from source. Even that gave trouble
> because I couldn't use yum or apt-get to update some packages that were
> required for PHP5, because they were not available. Don't know what
> using debian or fedora packages will do to my installation of scientific
> linux, probably break updating process.

Even if apt-get has it's root in Debian, the debian packages won install on a
RPM based system (you need a deb based system for that).

Fedora packages may work, but that depends on the package dependencies, one
way to get around those a bit is to use a source-rpm and rebuild it for your
system.

Yet another way would be to make your own rpm, there are guides that describes
how to do that and you can use a spec file from an older version as a
guideline for the new spec file.

There is the bound to break the system a bit later way, to make a bogus RPM
that will make the system tho think it has the rpm installed and you install
php from a tarball. Of course the dependencies that the tarball build has
won't be monitored, where it's smarter to build the rpm instead.


> What distro do you use ?

Nowadays I use Gentoo Linux for x86/amd64/PowerPC/Sparc, it has a somewhat
easy way to mix stable and unstable "packages", the drawback with Gentoo is
that you need to compile all the packages, which will use up resources on a
live server. You could always have a secondary machine which has the same
software installed and build the packages on it or an option that is somewhere
between is to use distcc (allows you to use more than one computer for one
compile).

--

//Aho

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