-devel packages

[Ed Griffin <edg ll mit edu>]

I understand RedHat is only providing binary packages for which they 
provide support, however many things do require -devel rpm's when you go 
to compile your own software that is outside of RedHat's normal provided 
list.  For example we do a lot of work with tcl/tk and the -devel 
packages were not provided however if you grab the source rpm for tcl/tk 
and do an rpmbuild --rebuild on the package it creates the binaries no 
problem.  Unfortunately there are other packages which have a lot of 
dependencies this time specifically in the gal/gnome/gtk world and 
trying to recompile from source rpms is ugly as you continually find 
missing dependencies.  Since the entire RHEL product line is supposed to 
work together I understand why they don't want to "support" packages 
that haven't been thoroughly tested but I would make my life and I am 
sure a lot of your lives easier if we had another CD (iso) that had all 
these unsupported -devel rpm's on them that are automatically created 
when the stuff is built but not supported by RedHat's extensive 
regression testing.

I would like to field WS as my primary developers workstations almost 
immediately but if I have to recompile a bunch of packages and figure 
out dependencies it is going to be a real pain.

As an example...

[root regan edg]# rpmbuild --rebuild gal-0.23-1.src.rpm
Installing gal-0.23-1.src.rpm
error: Failed build dependencies:
       gnome-vfs-devel is needed by gal-0.23-1
       gnome-print-devel >= 0.22 is needed by gal-0.23-1
[root regan edg]# rpmbuild --rebuild gnome-vfs-1.0.5-13.src.rpm
Installing gnome-vfs-1.0.5-13.src.rpm
error: Failed build dependencies:
       GConf-devel is needed by gnome-vfs-1.0.5-13
       oaf-devel is needed by gnome-vfs-1.0.5-13

Any suggestions?  Thanks.

--Ed

--
*****************************************************************
Ed Griffin
Assistant Network/System Administrator
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Weather Sensing Group
(781) 981-2871
mailto:edg ll mit edu
*****************************************************************