In trying to keep RHEL 6 up to date without support, I am sometimes both amazed and disappointed at the way Red Hat keeps some of the SRPMs out of reach.
The RHSA notice presents a minor security warning about the Hplip libraries. But if you attempt to build from the SRPM, you’ll find a dependency almost impossible to fulfill. In order to build Hplip, you need sane-backends-devel. But that one is not normally installed, and if you lose your access to RHN, you’ll have to build it from source. That, in turn has a dependency on gphoto2-devel.
There is no source for that. I scoured the freely accessible repositories in both RHEL (including the Beta sources) and Fedora, and there is nothing close. Remember, a partial requirement is keeping the versions consistent. The version for gphoto2 is 2.4.7-4. The closest you’ll get is the FC12 package, which is 2.4.7-1. Even if you cheat and edit the SPEC file in the SRPM to call itself “-4” it won’t built the devel package. I have no idea why it’s excluded, but it won’t produce. Thus, you end up with something totally orphaned here. Then you end up wondering how the Red Hat developers built it themselves in the first place, except they simply aren’t being honest in releasing all the applicable SRPMs.
The CentOS developers noted this often enough in their developers mailing list. There are times you simply can’t replicate Red Hat’s work because they hold stuff back. I lack their expertise in recreating the missing SRPMs from sources, chasing down the peculiar collection of patches, etc. At any rate, the work-around is simply installing the sane-backends-devel RPM from the Beta repositories, because it’s the same version. But I’m still left without any source for gphoto2. I can get the dependency for it (libgphoto2) but not the item itself.
