[xymon] Fresh server install on RHEL5: source or yum repo?

[Buchan Milne]

On Tuesday, 27 July 2010 16:39:16 Xymon User in Richmond wrote:
> On Tue, July 27, 2010 10:39, Buchan Milne wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 27 July 2010 14:39:45 Xymon User in Richmond wrote:
> >> I'm about to begin migrating a hobbit server on Centos5 to an RHEL5
> >> server running xymon.  Would like to hear any thoughts/advice on
> >> whether to do a source install or a yum repo install. I'm a package
> >> management advocate, so I lean toward the yum install, but package
> >> management depends on the actual packages in the repo being managed on
> >> an ongoing basis.  I'd especially like to hear from Buchan M. and Neil
> >> F., since Buchan advised Neil about a year ago to do a yum
> >> installation.
> >
> > What do you need to hear from me?
> >
> > https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/devmon/index.php?title=InstallRHEL
> > orCentOS
> >
> > As I am now more involved in the Xymon project itself now, I may try and
> > improve matters further regarding packages, but I am not sure if it is
> > possible to host a repo on SourceForge.
> 
> Sorry, guess I should have elaborated.  I wanted to hear if you'd give the
> same advice now as a year ago, and whether we could count on a Xymon rpm
> repo being maintained going forward.  Looks like the answers are "yes" and
> "maybe".  Given that some of the rpm-based file locations differ from
> those resulting from a source install, I'm now leaning toward installing
> from source.

Some of the reasons to use packages are consistency with policies. For 
example, most distributions disallow packages from owning any files below 
/home, and require that operation of the software not require /usr to be 
writable at all times, and various other requirements. As such, logs cannot 
actually reside under the same parent directory as binaries. The packages 
provide symlinks to the real locations, so things look the same taking into 
account the difference in BBHOME.

> If the packages don't get maintained going forward, I'd end
> up having to migrate to source-based, and that would involve hand-tweaking
> the rpm-based locations.

Well, once I have more than one installation of software, I package it myself 
anyway, as maintaining a package becomes less work at about the 3rd 
installation. If I no longer maintain packages (although I do), that *really* 
doesn't mean that you would need to switch, you should consider rebuilding the 
SRPM ...

Being an open-source project, there really isn't any "you have to" or "you 
can't", only a "am willing to" or "am not willing to".

Regards,
Buchan