[Dclug] Am I missing something here?

[Przemek Klosowski]

   Right now I am trying to make a home on RH Enterprise 4 Workstation.  I

I would have recommended Fedora because it tends to have more
software available in its repositories , but OK...

   tried to install an RPM that I downloaded and it said that it would not
   install because it was missing other packages. Perl among them, and
   others.  Soooo, I, once again, began the seemingly endless journey of
   googling the names on the list and downloading and trying to install.

Do you think that Perl is installed on your system? rpm -q perl should report
the Perl version. If you don't have it, install it from the RedHat RPM; you
probably should be using up2date against RedHat software repositories.
Actually, I suspect that you already have Perl, but your new software requires
a newer version.

   After installing about a half a dozen things from the list, none of them
   appeared as RPMs, by doing:

	 perl Makefile.PL
	 ...
	 make install

RPM has no idea about the software you installed by hand. In fact, if you 
can't find the software you need in pre-made RPMs that fit the rest of your
distribution, you should try to get the source RPMs and make your own binary
RPMs and install it; it's actually quite simple:

     rpmbuild --rebuild perl*.src.rpm
     rpm -Uvh BUILD/i386/perl*i386.rpm

Only if that fails for some reason, you are allowed to do 'make
install'. YOu will have to live with the fact that your newly
installed toy won't be noticed by the RPM or apt-get dependency system
(I WILL be corrected by our Debian friends if I am wrong about
apt-get). You also will lose the automatic updating capability when
new versions of binary RPMs appear in your repositories.

   Is there some secret that no one has bothered to share that can make my
   efforts more effortless? or perhaps at least more fruitful?

Yes, the secret is to use a high-level packaging system such as yum
(fedora), up2date (redhat), apt-get (debian) or yast (suse)---they
keep track of dependencies and pull in all the needed packages. Their
downside is that the dependencies are tricky in general, so they work
best if you use a distribution-specific repository, which may not have
all or latest of the software you need.. In my opinion, the most
responsive repository is the one maintained by Fedora,