Connie,

On Aug 24, 2010, at 17:06 , Connie Sieh wrote:

> Are there prebuilt rpms and src.rpm of ROOT (http://root.cern.ch) for both SL 4 and SL 5 for version 5.26 available?  I have looked for rpms at Dag, EPEL , http://root.cern.ch without success.  There have been a few references to a src rpm but the person who made the spec file is not supporting it any more.


a minute after your mail, I received the announcement of Fedora 14 alpha - and it's supposed to come with ROOT. No clue who packaged it, but that src.rpm is probably a reasonable starting point.

I have my doubts regarding a generally useful ROOT build, though: This software has tons of build time options, often depending on external software. A "one size fits all" build would probably depend on a dozen or more additional packages most users won't care for. On the other hand, building ROOT for a certain use case is fairly trivial. This may explain why there are few prebuilt packages around.

Another issue is that users tend to create code that works with a certain ROOT version only, and any update - even within a major version - is likely to cause grief for some of those depending on the previous minor release. At the same time, there will be other users requesting the very latest release as soon as it's available. Hence, unless you're catering for a small and well defined user community, you inevitably end up providing multiple releases at the same time, and some mechanism to switch between them. I wonder whether the Fedora package provides this...

The bottom line is that providing tailored builds for those actually requesting them is probably the best way to go. Teaching them to create those builds themselves may make even more sense.

The ROOT release schedule has slowed down recently, so things may be changing. But I don't think that "a prebuilt ROOT rpm" is a general solution yet. 

Hope this helps,
	Stephan

-- 
Stephan Wiesand
DESY -DV-
Platanenenallee 6
15738 Zeuthen, Germany