Re: RPMs for Firefox?

Todd and Margo Chester writes:

Sam wrote:
Todd and Margo Chester writes:

Hi,

Does anyone know of a source of RPM's for current
releases of Firefox that will run under CentOS Linux
(same as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, only cheaper)?
(YUM updates me to 1.0.8; FF is currently on 1.5.0.4)

If not, is there a way to roll my own RPM?

Well, you can certainly create your RPMs.

However doing so is not just a matter of pushing a few buttons.

See http://www.rpm.org

Learning how to create RPMs should take a few weeks. Learning how to create RPMs correctly will take a few years.

And that's assuming that you already have a technical/programming background and experience.



I was hoping for a utility, such as "rpm -ta firefox.xxx.tarball".

For this to work, the tarball must already include the necessary information for RPM to build packages from it directly.

Certainly, some software developers already do that, and include in the published RPMs all information that's needed to build RPMs directly off the source code. I don't know if this is done for Firefox -- I strongly doubt it.

For this to work, this tarball must be specifically prepared in advance, in a certain way. If you have a tarball that does not include the necessary magic for building RPMs, there is no separate magical tool to do that.

Having said that:

Some non-free, commercial software is distributed as already-compiled binaries -- obviously -- that are either extracted directly, or the tarball includes a crude setup script that copies and installs the files. Sun's Java SDK comes to mind as an example.

In this case you can still build a halfway-decent RPM using a "shim", a simple build script that does nothing more than unpack the binaries and package them up into an RPM.

I suppose there might be some script or tool out there that attempts to compile an RPM from pre-built binary files or installation image, but I wouldn't expect it to be very useful or well-tested.


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