Dave Pawson was asking how to grab 4Suite using yum. I'm still yet to post a follow-up based on Dave's earlier question, and thanks to Eric Gaumer for carrying on the thread in some of the direction I'd planned, and I'll try to get back to that topic today. Anyway, Dave and I weren't really successful getting 4Suite 1.0b1 yum. I'm posting here for reference to our journey, and in the hopes that someone can help.
I use apt rather than yum, so i had to remember the right yum mojo again, but I started by looking at what I had on my system:
# rpm -q 4Suite 4Suite-1.0-3
OK. That's odd. 4Suite 1.0 is still in beta, so that's a strange version number. So I found out the real version number:
# rpm -ql 4Suite | grep "Xml/__packageInfo__.py$" | xargs grep
"^version" version = '1.0a3'
Ah. I see now. They omitted the "a" part. Well, it's one 4Suite release behind—not bad, but there are so many improvements in 4Suite 1.0b1 that you should really get the latest.
I went looking on google and found a promising candidate, 4Suite-1.0-8.b1.i386. This looks like it's in fedora-devel, so I tried looking at how to add that repository. I found help on aaltonen.us, where you can find the following yum repo spec:
[development] name=Fedora Core $releasever - Development Tree #baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/$basearch/ mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-core-rawhide enabled=1 gpgcheck=1
I handed this off to Dave to try out (turned out the magic incantation
is yum install 4Suite.i386). But the resulting chain of dependencies
was way too far out on the bleeding edge. Dave was seeing updates to
the likes of "perl, python, libxml, mysql kde, gnome, k3b the list goes
on!":
I can't see that this is a true dependency from 4suite Uche?
Error: Missing Dependency: libdb_cxx-4.2.so is needed by package openoffice.org-libs
Error: Missing Dependency: libedataserver.so.3 is needed by package openoffice.org
Error: Missing Dependency: libebook.so.8 is needed by package openoffice.org
Error: Missing Dependency: gcc = 3.4.3-22.fc3 is needed by package gcc-g77
Oops. Ouch. The problem with the RPMs seems to be that fedora core is still testing the transition from 4Suite 1.0a3 to 1.0b1, and that's quite understandable. I look forward to seeing the more recent version in fedora core base.
At this point I advised David to ditch yum, just use the .src.rpm from the official 4Suite download and use rpmbuild to make himself a package. That also turned out to be a dead end: the spec file in the 1.0b1 release appears to be borked. Our fault. Ay ay ay. One of those days. I'll make sure it's fixed before the next release.
In the end Dave installed 4Suite from source, using "setup.py install", and all was well. I should have just told him to do that from the start.
Meanwhile, some notes from the fedora-devel 4Suite-1.0-8.b1 RPM.
The description is way out of date. I think it's 2 years old or more. For one thing 4Suite hasn't included 4DOM in aeons. I suggest the Fedora maintainers take the description from 4Suite.org.
Also, it requires "PyXML >= 0.7", but we dropped that requirement in the 4Suite 1.0b1 release.
Finally, it says "python-abi=2.4" is required. I suppose that might be FC3 maintainer preference, but I did want to mention that Python 2.2.3 is sufficient (though we do recommend 2.3.5).