Determining latest stable version for download

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 11:56 AM Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 03/21/2019 09:36 AM, Tim Johnson wrote:
> >   Michael, I should have asked the following question:
> >   Would I be able to install from the EPEL Repository or the Redhat
> >   Software Collections to a local ~/bin?
>
> I am not sure, but have my doubts. Software Collections distributes
> software in RPM, with pathes hardcoded to /opt/rh/.
>
> You may be able to use "alien" to convert the RPM to a tarball that you
> could untar somewhere in your home directory.  The scripts to "enable" a
> software collections module into your current path would work regardless
> of install point.  Maybe this is faster than compiling from source?  I'm
> not sure.

I don't know about RPMs, but it'll most likely be equivalent to what
I've done with Debian packages. Advantages include not needing to
install the dev libraries for everything, not needing to worry about
optimization settings on the compilation (ideally, the upstream
packager will use PGO), and some verification that it should work with
your libraries. Disadvantages include that there may be paths
hard-coded into it (if you build from source, you can tell it to put
it in ~/bin), and having to learn how to extract your platform's
packages. Often worth it.

ChrisA