Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 12:01:10 -0600
From: Ivo Penzar <penzar.ivo@mayo.edu>
To: redhat-install-list@redhat.com
Subject: Re: RH x.x & rpm install question

There is a very nice and useful "RPM Web Repository":

http://rufus.w3.org/linux/RPM

provided by W3C and MIT. It lists all the Red Hat rpm packages, sorted
by distributions, and whether do they belong to "official", "update",
"contrib", etc., directories.

However, it's not just another FTP mirror. For every package you can
check its name, size, vendor, date...; you can check which libraries are
required (i.e., dependencies), and you can check which packages (sorted
by distributions) would provide those libraries as required.

E.g., suppose that you have RH 5.0 and you want to install
netscape.communicator*.rpm:

First, go to the "RPM sorted by name" page and find the
netscape-communicator-4.04-3.rpm

As you can see, it is available both for 4.2 and 5.0 distributions (pay
attention to the colors on the right: green represents 5.0, brown 4.2).
Click on the green. Now you see the basic info about this package (there
is also a link to download the package), and you can see which other
resources (libraries) are required. E.g., libm.so.5 library is required.
Click on its link, and now you'll find the different packages
(libc-5.3.12.25-i386.rpm, libc-5.4.38-1.i386.rpm, etc.) helpful to
provide this particular package, sorted again by distributions (and
shown in different colors).

This way you can check all the ten resources (libraries) required for
the netscape-communicator*.rpm. You'll find that five or six another
packages are needed to fulfill the dependencies as required. You should
check whether your distribution CD contains those packages, and whether
they are already installed or not. Always use the rpm package manager
(glint is not of much help, if any). Read the rpm man pages... In some
cases you would need to force (--force) rpm to install the particular
package, maybe even neglecting its dependencies (--nodeps). Be careful.
Of course, first download the missing packages.

Ivo



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