I'm using Drupal on Fedora. Specifically, I'm using an RPM installation of Drupal 6.9 that I backported to Fedora 8. As it's way too easy to screw up an RPM-based installation of pretty much anything by mixing in code outside of the pkg mgmt system (I don't suppose anyone can guess how I found that out), when the need arose to use the admin_menu, FCKEditor and IMCE packages arose here, I wrote .spec files and turned the tarballs on the drupal.org site for the aforementioned modules into SRPMs and RPMs. If anyone else is already doing this (building RPMs versions of modules), I'd be interested in helping out; if not, I'll gladly make available the packages I've built, back-ported, etc. I've seen posts from a number of people who've gone nuts trying to get an RPM based installation of drupal (or ______) to work; I've documented what one needs to do in order to get a working installation of _____ after all the RPMs are installed for a number of different packages over the years, and I'll gladly pass that information along, too - setting up a "how to" site v/v getting an RPM installation of _____ running was actually what got me interested in using Drupal in the first place.
There don't seem to be a whole lot of RPMs out there for contributed modules - admin_menu, FCKeditor, and IMCE, for example. I did find RPM, SRPM packages for the date, CCK, views and service_links modules in the Fedora RPM repository, so the need to build them ({S}RPM packages) apparently crossed someone's mind at some point. I'm betting this issue has probably come up before - though I've been unable to find any posts, etc. discussing it - so I'm not sure why there aren't more modules in RPM format.
For those using Fedora, RHEL, and other RPM based systems - I've noticed there aren't many repositories with back-ports, unofficial builds, etc. - there are three of which I'm aware. With respect to back-ports, I'm referring to newer versions of a software package than what's included in the official Fedora, etc. repositories: Fedora 8 has RPMs for PostgreSQL 8.2, which is a bit too dated for my tastes. However, my Fedora 8 systems are, at this point, nicely stable, and I'm reluctant to upgrade merely to get a newer version of a particular package. For a a database, I'm using an RPM installation of PostgreSQL 8.3.6, which I built using as a starting point the Fedora 10 SRPM for the package, along with its build time and run-time dependencies.
Please note that at this point I'm still fairly new to Drupal; I do have a substantial background in computing, and hopefully, now that I've got a working test and production installation, both with mutiple sites/server, will "be there" with Drupal shortly; but, at present, I'm still "finding my way around" Drupal (and very much liking what I'm seeing).
If this isn't the correct venue for this, if someone could please point me towards the correct one, I would really appreciate it. Thanks.
- Larry