Re: Have Enterprise via SRPM for free?

["nate" <redhat aphroland org>]

scott.list said:

> What would be the difference except support from having a "real"
> enterprise version?

software wise, none. there was a thread on this fairly recently,
someone compared the SRPMS to what is on the redhat enterprise
CDs and they are identical, just have to rebuild them on a
compadible system. for shits and giggles I tried on my redhat
7.3 box but no go, I guess it's too new :/ didn't look into
it much. and I don't have any other versions of redhat.

> Perhaps it's the quartely non-security updates that aren't avail?

I'd expect the quarterly updates are security updates, just
packaged on CD(I used to recieve monthly sun solaris updates
on CD, never used em though, the online version was faster and
easier).

> With the point of all this of having a basic server that is more
> "stable" or at least longer lasting than the expected life of the now
> regular/ever-EOLing RHX versions (sorry... for free).

assuming you specifically referring ot a redhat server then yeah
this is something you could do. or you could *cough*run*cough*another
*cough*distribution*cough*like*cough*debian*cough*which*cough*has*cough*
a*cough*much*cough*longer*cough*release*cough*cycle(/shameless plug).

> Finally, and I admit I'm RH spoiled, I've never had the need to make an
> RPM from SRPM.  How difficult is it?  Any caveats?  Build'em and Use'em
> like normal?  Or more painfull than $350+/year.

just build it on a supported system, I think redhat 7.1 may
be the one to go for RH AS 2.1, not sure. It was more of a pain
then I expected trying to get it to build on 7.3. rpm makes
rebuilding from source pretty easy, ideally perhaps you could
make a single "script"
find . -name "*.src.rpm" | xargs rpm --rebuild

and maybe magically everything will get built, you should do a full
install of whatever version is the one to use, including all development
stuff.

after that, I would reccomend "upgrading" the system to the
AS that you just built, then recompile *again*, so that the
files are built against the advanced server stuff. probably
not required but I'd still reccomend it.

nate