Setting up an archived repository

[xilix]

Hi,

There is an old program that I used several years ago on Fedora 9 that has since been orphaned. The last distro of inclusion was F13. The packages are all available in the archived Fedora repositories. I would like to try to install it on F17 and I'm wondering if this would be possible to do? Would I be able to set up the archived repos in my sofware sources and then use the package manager or yum to install them? If not, are thier other concievable alternatives? What conflicts or other problems should I be aware of before attempting this?

thx

[bob]

It might help if you mentioned the package involved.

[xilix]

Hi bob,

The package is poker3d; a 3d poker client.

[marko]

Looks like it's in freecode:

http://freecode.com/projects/poker3d

Here's the old Fedora project page which like you said looks to be dead
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Games/poker3d

[xilix]

Thanks for the links. The packages there are for i386 arch. I have amd64 arch. The amd64 arch packages are available at http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/arch...4/os/Packages/. I am wondering if I can use these in fedora 17.

[cazo]

If you have the source package (usually named *.src.rpm), you can try building for F17. Usually, you can modify an older .spec file to build from a newer source.

If it's orphaned, you can look into being a packager maintainer for it (so it will be available for others too). See the info at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Categ...ge_Maintainers.

[xilix]

Thank you Cazo,

The source rpm is available but one or two dependencies are no longer in Fedora 17 either. I am going to try and build it from source and see what happens.

[cazo]

Since those dependencies aren't in the F17 repos, you'll have to build & install those too. You might also need their -devel packages as well (and any -devel packages those need - this is known as "dependency hell").

I forgot to mention that (in case you don't already know), packages don't have to be in a repository to be installed. Yum can also install a local package (one that you've downloaded or built yourself).

yum install path_to_rpm_package

(yum used to use localinstall for this, but now just uses install for local & remote packages).

Also, you can mix i386 & x86_64 packages on an x86_64 system. And, some older Fedora packages still work with Fedora 17, even though they've been orphaned for several years. Fedora 17 has some fc15 packages. I also have a .fc10 package (nautilus-dropbox-1.4.0-1.fc10.x86_64.rpm).

Finally, rpm packages aren't necessarily a requirement (they do make it much easier to manage though). You can also install programs built from a "tar ball" (usually named with ".tgz", ".tar.gz" or similar). With those, you extracted the package's source somewhere, then use

make && make install

or sometimes

.configure && make && make install

(sometimes, you'll have to use sudo make install instead), if you do this as your user instead of "root").

Usually, a "tar ball" will have a file named README and/or INSTALL that will tell you what's required to build & install the program from source.