Start/2004-05-03/1

New RPMs for you

My strategy for managing the software that I install is simple: Everything must be packaged in RPM format. That way I can automate the management process, using yum to take care of installation, removal, and dependency tracking for me.

When I want to install a software package that isn't available in RPM format, I package it myself. It's an easy process once you get the hang of it, but getting the hang takes some time, mostly because RPM-building documentation is scarce and not particularly good. (The Fedora project's RPM guidelines are a recent and welcome addition to the available documentation and are probably the best place to start.)

The discipline of packaging everything I install does require an investment of time and effort, but that investment is well repaid: I can easily deploy and keep up-to-date numerous, complex server and workstation "build outs." I have no fear of the slow accumulation of installer cruft, the kind that causes many savvy Windows users preventively to rebuild their systems from scratch every year. Every file installed on my system is owned by a package, and every package is tracked in a database, and that database is managed by yum, and I simply tell yum what to do. Yum does my bidding, keeping me out of trouble while it does it. Yes, it's an investment that I gladly make.

The great thing about Free software is that once I've made the investment for a particular package, you don't need to. Instead, you can just use my package. To aid in this kind of sharing, I have started to post my packages to the RPMs section of the site. Right now I have posted some Haskell and Emacs packages. More will follow, so check back from time to time. I don't think that I'll be competing with FreshRPMs or DAG any time soon, but I'm happy to fill in a few of the gaps in these excellent larger repositories.