[horde] RPM feedback ... Problem on Red Hat 7.2

[Richard G Konlon]

Hermit, Jason, Brent

Thanks for your initial responses.  Let me consolidate your input into 
this single posting, with my comments & followup questions. I have also 
included a summary version of my initial posting at the end of this 
posting for completeness

Hermit wrote:
 > Welcome to RMP hell. ;-)  This stuff is much too common with RPM.
 >
 > I have installed RPM's and had the system tell me that weren't
 > installed.  (I believe the intial complaint)  So I reninstall and it
 > tells me that it can't because they are already installed.  This has
 > happend on more than one occasion.  So I DO know of what I speak.  Ever
 > try to take off a small utility and have it decide to uninstall Gnome
 > because of 'dependency' issues? I have.  They are great when they work,
 > but when they don't .....

Hermit -

Fortunately for me, I have had pretty good experience with RPM's.  I 
have not been burnt by 'dependency' issues, but rather have found the 
'dependency' tracking very helpful ... when installing.

Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
 > What's the problem?  Source RPMs (.src.rpm) aren't final installable
 > packages; installing one only unpacks it into the build area so that
 > it can be built or tweaked.

Brent J. Nordquist wrote:
> Richard, that's normal for SRPMs; you then "cd /usr/src/redhat" and do
> "rpm -bb SPECS/xx.spec" as root to build the binary ones.  (See the RPM
> man page for details.)  Your alternative is to just download the regular
> RPMs and install those.

Jason, Brent -

Well I show my ignorance (but I am trainable).  I haven't worked with 
SRPMs much and "assumed" that SRPM installs were tracked the same as 
binary installs. I now see that the SRPM and RPM package names would 
also collide.  Interesting that a "-src" extention is not added to the 
package-name to make the SPRM and RPM distinguishable and then allow 
SRPM installs to be tracked.  I'm guessing that there would be other 
issues raised trying to track SPRMs as well (since if one installs 
source, you probably intend to modify it), but that's a discussion for 
another email-list, not horde.

HOWEVER, the ftp://ftp.horde.org/pub/horde/rpms/SRPMS/rh7/horde-2.0-1.README
file include the passage ...

    "UPGRADING
     The Horde RPMs are designed to be upgradable (rpm -U option)."

So how does "-U" work if the install of the SRPM is not tracked ?

Brent -

Thanks for the tip on "rpm -bb SPECS/xx.spec". I missed this in the man 
page since I was thinking "install" rather than "build".

The only reason that I chose the SRPMs over the RPMs is that I had the 
impression that the RPMs were not always as current as the SRPMs and 
tarballs.

Thanks again to all.

----------------------------------------------
  Richard G. Konlon, Director
  Orinda,  CA  94563
  925-253-1177   Fax: 707-371-0339
----------------------------------------------

Richard G Konlon Initial posting (summary):
 > I downloaded the two RPMs "horde-2.0-1.src.rpm" and "imp-3.0-1.src.rpm"
 > and then attempted to install them.
 >
 > In both cases, "rpm -qpl" shows that each "xx.rpm" file contains exactly
 > three components; 1 "xx.tar.gz" file, 1 "xx.conf" file and 1 "xx.spec"
 > file. Running "rpm -ivh" produces no error messages, but a subsequent
 > "rpm -q" indicates that the package is NOT installed.
 >
 > I did find the files installed(?) at /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES and
 > /usr/src/redhat/SPECS.  Is this all the "rpm -ivh" was supposed to do?