On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 07:04:29AM -0400, Gene Heskett enlightened us:
> We did at one time have someone subscribed here that was doing the 
> redhat rpm's, and he would speak up anytime we started to get down on 
> the rpm vs the tarballs, but he has not made any posts here in many 
> months now that I'm aware of.  I would be nice if he spoke up, 
> possibly answering your question specificly.
> 

I'm not him, obviously, but he is lurking. Jay is usually idle on the #amanda
irc channel, and I have had some discussion with him about the state of the
RPMs for redhat. Unfortunately he also has a hojillion other packages to
maintain, so he can't dedicate a lot of time to amanda.

FWIW, I have made packages of 2.4.4-p1 that are pretty much the RH packages
with a couple tweaks to the .spec file. Namely, there are 2 variables at the
top of the .spec to define your tapeserver and your config name. The problem
with packaging binary files for amanda is that you have to resort to using
localhost where a hostname is required so the thing will at least mostly
work. Because of this, I put the variable at the top of the spec file and
recommend people rebuild the source rpm after making the appropriate changes
to the .spec. 

If anyone is interested in this, you can get it from (sorry it wraps):
http://www.math.ohiou.edu/mirror/casit/contrib/9/SRPMS/amanda-2.4.4p1-2mrh3.src.rpm

To install it "correctly" goes something like this:

$ rpm -i amanda-2.4.4p1-2mrh3.src.rpm
edit the .spec file (in /usr/src/redhat/SPECS if you build as root)
$ rpmbuild -ba amanda.spec
# rpm -Uvh amanda-2.4.4p1-2mrh3.i386.rpm ... 
      (in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386 if you build as root)

You don't have to build amanda as root from the rpm (and I recommend that
you don't just on principle). I've fed these changes up to Jay and he's
created bugzilla entries (or at least was going to. If he hasn't, maybe this
can be his poke in the ribs...) to make it a little easier to build amanda
for your location and still have the package be managed instead of resorting
to *cringe* tarballs. ;-)

Matt
      
-- 
Matt Hyclak
Department of Mathematics 
Department of Social Work
Ohio University
(740) 593-1263