Re: Updating to net-snmp 5.3 on Fedora Core 4 (FC4)

Thanks for the explanation.  That helps a lot.  I checked the permissions
but that didn't seem to be the problem.  I'll look at it again and see if I
can make better progress.

Incidentally, I noticed that the 5.3 binaries are no longer available and
the 5.3.0.1 binaries that replaced them no longer an "fc4" variety.  Is this
just a matter of waiting for it to be added or should I not wait for one to
show up?

Thanks.
-- Brad

On 1/17/06, Dave Shield <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 10:45 -0500, Bradford Ritchie wrote:
> >   If Fedora uses a different naming convention, why aren't
> >  those names used in the FC4 files listed on sorceforge.
>
> Because there are different people looking after these two
> repositories, and they've make different choices about how
> to package things.
>
> RedHat decided that they wanted to separate "client-side"
> tools from the basic SNMP agent (allow greater flexibility
> in what to install), and the Fedora releases have followed
> this convention.
>
> We decided that we wanted as few different binary packages
> as possible  (because we're offering support for a wider
> variety of O/S's, and the more different bits there are for
> each, the more confusing it is).   And we regard the basic
> package as comprising *both* the agent and clients, so that's
> what we package for *all* systems (not just RedHat-based Linux).
>
>
>
> >   In other words, what use is it to have an FC4 rpm that doesn't
> > follow the FC4 naming convention, since it can't get (completely)
> > installed in the normal way.
>
> But it *should* be possible to install this in the normal way.
> We'd tried to mark our RPM as obsoleting both the Fedora-supplied
> ones - obviously we didn't get that quite right, and it's something
> we'll have to look into.
>
>
> >   Maybe I'm missing something but I would assume that if somebody
> > bothered to build it and create the rpm, then it must be installable.
>
> These RPMs definitely *are* installable.  I've installed them on my
> own FC4 system.   Probably not as an upgrade from the FC-supplied
> ones, though - most of the developers probably remove the vendor
> supplied versions as a matter of course, since we're mostly working
> on cutting edge code.
>
>
> > I did try building everything using the tarball... is there an
> > advantage to building it from the srpm?  If I install it from the
> > srpm, will yum recognize it's presence and allow it to be upgraded in
> > the future?
>
> The basic advantage of building from SRPM is that you end up with
> an RPM, that can be installed in the normal manner.  This means
> that the RPM system knows about the software, and can update it
> (via yum), uninstall it cleanly, tell you what files belong to this
> package, etc, etc.
>
> Compiling and installing from the tarball doesn't do this - the
> software would be invisible to anything that *does* use the RPM
> mechanism (e.g. packages that depend on Net-SNMP)
>
>
> Actually, looking at your original report, the main problem seems
> to be:
>
> >  Cannot open file: net-snmp-perlmods-5.3-1.fc4.i686.rpm. Skipping.
>
> That almost feels like a permission problem (or else yum can't
> actually find the file referred to).   I know this may sound
> obvious, but have you checked that the RPM file is present in
> the right place, and readable?
>    Particularly given that the main RPM installs correctly,
> I'd want to compare the two files (location, permissions,
> ownership, etc), and look for any differences.
>
> Dave
>
>