[Philosophy] Rebuilding rpm packages with different configuration options

[John Wendel]

The current thread "download srpms and rebuild package with other 
options" has raised a few questions in my small brain that I hope will 
stimulate an interesting discussion.

[1] If I rebuild and install a package, what keeps a later update from 
destroying my version?

[2] If the answer to [1] is "nothing", then why bother with a package 
management system for this update?

[3] Why shouldn't I be able to update the RPM database manually 
(without actually installing or updating software)?

I'd like to tell it that I have installed program "foobar version 
99.9", so when the package maintainers release version 99.8 it won't 
try to update.

[4] I recently tried to yum remove "cups\*", I couldn't do it because 
of the package dependencies. It seems that everything that can print 
has a cups dependency. But really, things continue to work fine 
without cups, so the dependency isn't real. It seems that the package 
dependency thing is just broken. Comments ???

Maybe I should just learn how to use rpm ...

Sorry for the stupid questions, but I'd appreciate your comments.

Thanks,

John