Sorry if I came off with a strange attitude, I didn't realize that I was.
The purpose of my question was not to start a debate about the AS SRPM's and Redhat being gracious enough to provide them, but rather how to go about building the CD's (binaries) from them or any other version's SRPM's. It seems that you would need a like system to build from or they would not work. Or am I just not understanding the process?
thanks Steve
Steve, I don't really know what your level of expertise is, so I hope that I am not being pedantic,
At a very high level, a source RPM is just an archive of the source tarball of an application, the patches, a configuration
file used by RPM that tells RPM how to unpack the source, apply the patches, configure the make options
and make the source code into binaries (there are lot's of details and other little things, but that is the basic gist).
If you have a RedHat server and you have installed gcc and make and rpm and rpm-build
you can then get a source RPM file and run "rpmbuild --rebuild name-of-package.version-number.source.rpm"
and the rpmbuild utility will unpack the source rpm file into it's constituent parts:
The source,
patches
the build instructions
config files
And then the rpmbuild utility will build the source code into a binary and package all the resulting files back
up into a binary RPM file that can be installed on other systems that have the rpm utility.
You are correct that you need a "like" system to do the builds from.
Usually it is recommended that if you are building a binary RPM for a distribution
that the SRPM be built into an RPM on the same distribution that you plan on installing it.
However it doesn't have to be exactly identical, just the libraries that it dynamically links against
and the directory structure should be the same (and such.)
From what I have seen from my investigations you could probably start with RedHat 7.2
and build the SRPM's one at a time and install them. Of course starting with things like
gcc, and glibc, and the kernel, and make and such, and working on to things like
KDE and mozilla last....
As far as building the CD's there is a good article here: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6473
I was lucky in that I had a RHAS 2.1 server to build all the SRPM's on.
I found that I could set up an FTP repository and then use a RedHat 7.2 bootnet floppy to
do a network install of a server, where all the RPM's that were being installed were from
the RHAS set of RPM's.
-Ben.
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