[rt-users] Frustrating attempts to install RT3.8 from RPM

[Wes Modes]

Paul, sounds like you aren't a long term fan of Fedora, RHEL, or CentOS,
so I'm guessing yum feels like an inconvenience to you, especially when
it seems to be getting in the way of your desired install.

I've been a sysadmin for 20 years and I've never been a fan of the make
'n' break style of system administration.  There is no way I could
manage a score of machines, many with subtly different hardware, if I
had to build every package the old way.  As it is, I can spend a few
hours monthly updating the OS and all installed software on all of our
machines, with a simple "yum -y update"

In my opinion, package managers like apt-get and yum are some of the
best things to happen to OS in a very long time.  Having installs
tracked and managed by package managers keeps complicated OSs and their
installed software up-to-date, eases system administration (especially
as the server to sysadmin ratio increases), increases scalability,
increases sysadmin efficiency, and creates standards for software
manufacturers. 

If as a conservative sysadmin you prefer to operate well-back from the
bleeding edge anyway, the small trade-off in control is a small price to
pay.

It is hardly the package manager's fault if a software manufacturer such
as Best Practical and its user community fail to create a package for
the latest software.  Compare that to software whose RPMs are kept
relatively up-to-date. 

Wes

On 11/2/2010 3:49 PM, Paul wrote:
> On 11/02/2010 02:19 PM, Wes Modes wrote:
>> Hello, I have been struggling with attempts to install RT3.8 via RPMs.  
>>
>> I know it is perfectly possible to install RT3.8 using the BP install
>> scripts and docs, but I'd prefer to do it through yum for system
>> sustainability, ease of updates and upgrades, etc.
> ...
>> If I can't resolve this, I will just forget about RT3.8 and stick with
>> RT3.6 of which there is a well-behaved RPM already in the EPEL repo.
>>
>> Wes
>>
> I'm currently going through a RT move from freebsd to rhel5 (long story,
> would rather stay with freebsd but don't have a choice here) and have
> found all kinds of annoying difficulties with yum (or, rather, the
> packages available.) When I realized that I was trying to stick with yum
> for ease of upgrades when yum was preventing me from easily keeping up
> to date, life got a lot easier.
>
> In the end I just let cpan install what it could and used yum for the
> things that gave me trouble in cpan. Using RT's configure and make
> targets is a lot easier and much more maintainable than having to roll
> my own rpm just to do it the yum way.
>
> Being stuck with an old version of the software in the name of easy
> upgrades didn't make sense to me.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul