I have Yellow Dog Linux on my PS3. I often have to build newer versions from source as Yellow dog is not bleeding edge. I build these in /usr/local. I muddle through by configuring, getting an error, hitting Google, making, getting an error, hitting Google, etc.
My questions are if I build a newer version from source can I remove the older rpm? (to conserve HDD space. Only 10GB)
Does software that depend on the rpm link to the new libraries automatically?
I have /usr/local/lib & include before /usr/lib & include in /etc/ld.so.conf.
For applications it should be no problem to to remove the old rpms, with libraries I would be much more careful.
If you try to remove the library rpms you’ll get into trouble with the dependency management of your package manager, which will probably tell you it’ll remove half your applications if you remove one library. You can circumvent that, but I would not recommend that.
The other problem is that older applications are not always compatible with newer libraries, I would personally not risk to remove library rpms that other packages depend on.
The only thing you lose is some space on your hard drive.