Libmateweather update on el9

Rocky Linux Help & Support
1

I use the Mate desktop on my Rocky 9 computers and a few months ago the weather applet that lives in the desktop panel and shows you the current temperature quit working because the server that it gets the information from changed its format.

libweather for Mate 1.28 was updated to account for this but Rocky 9 uses Mate 1.26 and libweather was never updated.

So in the spirit of scientific experimentation I just downloaded libmateweather-1.28.0-10.fc44.src.rpm and compiled it on the Virtualbox image of Rocky 9 that I keep for purposes like this.

It compiled and installed without issue and the weather applet immediately started working again as expected.

Now I’m wondering if there’s any reason why I shouldn’t just install these updated rpms (libmateweather-1.28.0-10.el9.x86_64.rpm and libmateweather-data-1.28.0-10.el9.noarch.rpm) on my “real” computers. Can any of you fine folks see any reason why using these updated rpms would be a bad thing, if it would somehow break things when I do a dnf update on these computers or anything like that?

I haven’t thought of anything so far, but I suspect I could be missing something and not seeing the woods for the trees here.

2

I’ve built and used apps from Fedora before using those source rpms. As long as the dependencies allow it to be built, there shouldn’t be any real issues as far as I can see. Worse would be building an older package since in the future newer packages could change the dependencies and not allow it to build. Or even the fact the older package is installed, could cause the newer packages to fail to update because of it. But you would see that kind of scenario during an update. In your case however, I doubt this would happen since the package is newer.

Mate is in EPEL, so there is every chance in the future they will update it to Mate 1.28.