> I'm running RHEL-5, I found it the most stable and secure Distro that runs smoothly almost all the high-end simulation and 3D applications that I'm using intensively, the problem is that there are dozens of simple but important applications/utilities that requires higher versions of glibc and python, those that where supplied as rpm packages that requires newer versions of the RPM to be installed!
"supported" life that they become irrelevant.
I'm not sure that ether's any "enterprise" distro with a solid upgrade path.
Dag's repository is likeliest best both reputation ally and in in "reality".
> So, I decided to build a custom system installation that satisfies all my needs.
> I manually forced upgrade glibc with a version that gives 2.6 and 2.7 without breaking the system dependencies, and I compiled python-2.7.2, and now my system runs really great! and I can run those new applications smoothly.
Upgrading REHL5 to python-2.7.2 is non-trivial: congratulations on success.
> The only one thing that I'm suffering from is that I have to manually extract and install them since they require higher signature of fileDegist, payload and rpm compressing... for that I decided to upgrade to RPM-5 to be able to install them regularly using the RPM Packager.
to release a compatible version of rpm.
older option, it has been 6 years or so: --nomd5sums? something like that).
(there's a shell script that permits inserting a unxz where needed).
cannot find something that Just Works.
> Any advices about that! are there an easy way to let the RPM source compile both of the i686 and x86_64 bit.
All depends on what is considered "easy".
even if I usually forget to check the setting when building.
> What I'm confused about, is that the RPM has many dependencies, and I don't know which one of them should be compiled for both i686 and x86_64 and which needs to only compile for x86_64.
All ELF dependencies have a "color" and are attached to file(s) (if the functionality is not disabled).
to see which dependencies are associated with each file.
(there's a --provides analogue to --requires too).
Other arch-specific dependencies are usually dictated by Packaging Policy Police somewhere.
Note that RHEL5 is particularly strangely painful in the way it handles ix86 <-> x86_64 "multilib".
In reply to: Belal Salem: "Re: rpmio not compiling"