[TriLUG] Whitebox vs. CentOS

[Matthew Todd]

On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 13:22, Christopher L Merrill wrote:
> Sometime in the coming weeks, I'll be installing Tomcat, Subversion,
> Maven and a few other Java development tools.


Excellent.

(This posting more for general community interest rather than
necessarily direct recommendation. JPackage last mentioned here May
2003.)


If you haven't seen JPackage, http://jpackage.org, you might enjoy it
for prepackaged Java-ish RPMs. It's great to say 'yum install tomcat5'
and end up with a tomcat user and good init scripts! (It's also
particularly nice for mod_jk2, should you go that route.)

The caveats being that 1. a few packages need to be built from SRPMs due
to licensing issues (particularly the JDK itself) and that 2. some
packages aren't there, like Maven or Eclipse 3. (They still distribute
2.1.)

But in all, I've found it more reassuring than extracting lots of
tarballs into my /opt directory, since they track fairly well with minor
version releases.

Randomly,  -- Matthew