On Mon, 7 Jul 1997, Peter Gerwinski wrote:
According to Jan-Jaap van der Heijden:
I have some preliminary stuff here to package GPC in an RPM. RPM is a popular package manager in the Linux world. It makes upgrading a binary distribution as easy as `rpm -U gpc-YYMMDD.i386.rpm'
Hmm ... now it is as easy as `tar xzf gpc-YYMMDD.i386-linux.tar.gz'. I am probably missing something.
Yup, there are several other advantages of using a package manager over plain .tgz files:
1) It will refuse to overwrite files during installation (unless forced). 2) It's able to properly uninstall a package. 3) When upgrading a package, it will delete unused files from a previous version that are no longer present in the new version.
There are other advantages, but this is not alt.rpm.advocacy ;-)
To keep track of all this, the package manager keeps a database of all installed files and their dependencies. Of course, installing a .tgz in a directory "contolled" by the package manager (i.e.: /usr) defeats this.
So, on any Linux system using a package manager (and these days, the only major distribution *not* using one is Slackware) you should either install GPC as a package, or install it outside the directories controlled by the package manager (i.e. in /usr/local). For Debian, a package already existed, and now I created one for the RPM based systems (at least RedHat and Caldera)
Hope this helps,
JanJaap
--- With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead. -- RFC1925.