RHEL or CentOS 5.x RPM sanity and not source installs

I am a firm believer in package managers. What's there not to like? Dependency chains, package verification before installation, package validation after installation, versioning and reproducibility are among my favorite reasons for liking the Redhat and Fedora default "RPM Package Manager" rpm  and by extension, yum.

The focus for this short article will be on RHEL or CentOS 5.5 as the base OS. These are often considered a "server" based OS and tend to focus on stability, security and not on newest version. However, with many production systems, there tends to be needs or demands imposed on the systems administrator. It  will be our issue to safeguard the installed base OS and even extended repository installs against harm. Many new creative and useful perl modules are not even available as rpm's. Or the versions that are found are relegated to an older version than required (by the boss, the project etc).

Every effort should be made avoid source installs. As an added deterrent, " DO NOT attempt to install software packages which are part of CentOS as a source package, because you think you absolutely need the newest version. THIS WILL OFTEN BREAK THINGS"

Luckily, there are many tools to help ease this burden by attempting to create an rpm package for you. Some will work better in certain situations than others. Some are designed to handle a specific type of source (like a perl module):

1. checkinstall is for general source installs that do not offer .spec files
2. rpmbuild is easy if there is a usable .spec file in the source install or if there is a .src.rpm file for the needed install
3. cpan2rpm will help with many pesky perl modules
4. perl2rpm will help with many pesky perl modules
5. cpanflute2 will help with many pesky perl modules

Here is an example from a recent requirement to have the newest tesseract-ocr 3.0 installed. Make sure you read over Setuping up an RPM Build Environment!

I found a needed tesseract-3.00-1.fc15.src.rpm from Fedora 15. The original source tar file did not have a spec file that was usable by RHEL/CentOS 5.5 version of rpmbuild. And it will not build without some help. Also the "--nomd5" is needed as rpm version issue from newer Fedora and RHEL and CentOS 5.x.

rpm -ihv --nomd5 tesseract-3.00-1.fc15.src.rpm
rpmbuild -bb /path/to/tesseract.spec
yum update /path/to/tesseract-3.00-1.i386.rpm

Darn. Can't install without a much newer version of the "optional" leptonlib of greater than 1.60. There is not an updated src.rpm version to be found anywhere. Going to need to use the source...

wget http://www.leptonica.org/source/leptonlib-1.67.tar.gz
tar -xzvf leptonlib-1.67.tar.gz
cd leptonlib-1.67
./configure
checkinstall -R --review-spec --install=no

Check through the generated spec ("--review-spec" - sometimes need to use "--fstrans=no" if checkinstall gets too many other files included)
Then finally:

yum update /path/to/leptonlib-1.67-1.i386.rpm /path/to/tesseract-3.00-1.i386.rpm

Checkinstall is one of my general go-to options for source installs when I come up empty looking for prebuilt rpm packages from known repositories.

But the fun was not over... boss wanted the newest perl Image-OCR-Tesseract module...

wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/L/LE/LEOCHARRE/Image-OCR-Tesseract-1.24.tar.gz
#no spec file to be found in the tar file
perl2rpm Image-OCR-Tesseract-1.24.tar.gz
yum install /path/to/perl-Image-OCR-Tesseract-1.24-1.noarch.rpm

Honestly, any one of perl2rpm or cpanflute or cpan2rpm would have worked.

Now boss is happy and sysadmin is happy and the CentOS forum won't hassle you as much about source installs ;)