[ale] How do people deal with RHEL?

[Don Lachlan]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 1:48 PM, James Sumners <james.sumners at gmail.com> wrote:
> The information on which RHEL I am using is not missing from my
> original post: "Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: rhel-i386-es-4".
> That is "Fetching packages list for RHEL 4 i386." As a Red Hat guy you
> should be able to understand that.

Snarking! That will surely get you some help!

> As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I know that I could build the
> package from source. I don't want to do that. Not only is that a
> maintenance nightmare (if I wanted the same package on all 5 of my
> RHEL servers then I would have to do the build 5 times), but I would

Go download the SRPM from Dag's site, review the spec file, review the
patches, make sure the source tarball checksums against the vendor
one, then build it once and deploy.

> I did not know about the EPEL repositories, and I might start using
> them. But they won't solve the problem I face today. Even these repos
> don't contain the package I want[3]. And that's exactly what I was
> bitching about in my original post -- lack of software available via
> the the package manager.
> [3] -- http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/4/i386/repoview/letter_n.group.html

You're running a distribution with a limited vendor package set. Duh.
If you want something outside of that, you need something community
supported, whether it's the Fedora community or "some guy" like Dag.

Plenty of solutions have been offered. We've even answered "why" RHEL
is like this, and you bitched about that. What more do you want? Go
complain to RedHat.

-L