Question about RPMs and dependancies.

[Bytor2000]

Hello

I have looked through countless pages about rpms and there was nothing I found about breaking dependancies.

Here is what I want to know. I have an rpm installed the GD library and a few programs use it like webalizer. The RPM is for 1.8.6 and I want to upgrade to the new version 2.*. When I use the WebMin interface to install the new RPM it says that there are dependancies that use the 1.8.6 version like Webalizer and so on. So I have chosen not to overwrite the install.

I am new to using RPMs and have always installed from the source code before. Should I uninstall the old RPM then install the new RPM? Will that break those dependancies so that programs like Webalizer will not be able to use the new RPM? Or should I overwrite the old RPM with the new?

Can someone please explain this to me?

 

[thedaver]

There are really two kinds of "dependencies" to concern you.

1) The dependency where the application in question needs an instance of the library by name and the best available version of that library.
2) The app needs the specific version of the library (or perhaps not version but approximate rev. level)

In your case the issue is GD rev 1.8x or 2.x. It's hard to know whether the app dependencies are based on rev or just needing the library. My experience has been that its rare for anything other than the IMAP or LDAP libraries (email) to have app dependencies on a particular version of the lib.

Short answer, go ahead and upgrade the libraries WITH RPM VERSIONS. Libraries from source over libraries from rpm will really mess things up.

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