[ILUG-BOM] We don't need no dependencies

[Philip S Tellis]

Sometime on Jul 19, Nikhil Joshi assembled some asciibets to say:

> > Or an even better idea is to download tarballs and then
> > create rpm packages out of them before installing.
>
> Sorry I cannot comprehend what you mean . Please enlighten.

You can create your own rpms from tarballs.  man rpm for more info.

> I even tried the tarballs and tried to ' make , ./configure ' and
> stuff like that but I got some hard to comprehend errors :(

You've got to read all the docs that come with tarballs, and then try
and isolate any errors that occur.  Don't worry about warnings.  Most
programs are written in C, and if you know C, the errors are somewhat
understandable.

> Just for curiosity :
> In old Unices (Hope I spelled it right ;-) )  how were the apps
> installed?

tarballs.  In the really old ones, they just copied the entire source,
and compiled it manually.  Then they made make to make making things
easier.  Then they started tarring the source to transport it, and
compressing it to make it smaller.  Most often though, they just needed
to transport diffs that basically had the diffs between the orgs and the
new versions.

Philip

-- 
Beware of the Turing Tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of
interest is easy.


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