NVIDIA driver compile

[Jean Francois Martinez]

On Tue, 2003-11-25 at 00:29, Peter Kiem wrote:
> > 2)  Everyone who has done some _serious_ software building will tell you
> > that compiling from a tar ball is highly unreliable.  configure will
> 
> Rubbish.  SRPMS **ARE** basically packaged tarballs inside!
> 

SRPMS are a lot more than tarballs since they define build time
dependencies (ie they refuse to build if this or that isn't installed),
configure flags (eg --with-acl, --with-openldap  in the case of samba)
install-time configure scripts


> I've built from SRPMS, tarballs and even tarballs to create an RPM and no
> one way is more reliable than the others.  I've had problems with all
> methods but mostly no problems either way.
> 

I have built some hundreds and unlike you pais attention to the messages
paid by configure

Lets give an example of things going wrong:

You build the library foo. There are optional features who depend of BAR
but while they are important they will not cause configure to abort the
compilation.

 The firt time you build FOO the configure script detects the library
bar and builds a foo who is bar aware.  Now you build some apps who use
foo but whose configure will detect that your foo is bar aware and your
applications will be built bar aware 

One day you uninstall the bar-devel package.  No problem.  The day after
you learn of a security hole in foo so you patch and rebuild it.  But
this time configure doesn't detect bar so when you install it all those
apps who relied on will BREAK 

In the case of an SRPM the packager can give a list of build time
dependencies, admittedly they are generally incomplete since they
have to be built by hand but packager can still ensure nothing important
is left out or that it will fit the environment (eg a distro he knows
it ships with BAR)

> > 3) Last but not least when I build from an SRPM I get an RPM.  I don't
> 
> Yes I normally prefer RPMs as well but I prefer to get my video drivers
> from the source instead of a 3rd party who I don't know or trust.
> 
> > BTW, building the Nvidia RPM is trivial, you have just to turn off the
> > build of a debug RPM
> 
> BTW, building the nVidia drivers following the instructions from nVidia is
> trivial too!
> 
> The only gotcha was the "export CC=gcc32" but other than that it was
> follow the bouncing ball material.
> 
> I was pointing out to the original poster who couldn't get the tarball
> from nVidia to compile the steps required rather than having to go
> elsewhere.

Nvidia provides SRPMS so in that case it is pointless to use
the tarball.  If it doesn't build then taking a look at the third party
srpm and using the info for building the NVIDIA provided SRPM is the
best option


-- 
Jean Francois Martinez <jfm512 at free.fr>