[TriLUG] Perl modules and RPMs

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 12:11, Mike Broome wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 11:53:22AM -0500, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
> 
> > If anyone is following this thread besides Tanner and myself, we
> > discussed this further on IRC; I opened a bug at Red Hat's bugzilla:
> > http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=78053
> > 
> > The patch from Mandrake 9 can be applied pretty easily to the perl SRPM
> > from Red Hat 8, which allows cpan2rpm to work nicely.  Let me know if
> > you'd like a copy of the modified SRPM.
> > 
> > --Jeremy
> 
> Hi, Jeremy,
> 
> I'm following this thread (since I asked the question that started the
> discussion :).  I'm interested in the modified SRPM.  If you can send it
> (or a pointer to where I could grab it) that'd be great.

Sure, here it is:

http://www.trilug.org/~jeremy/SRPMS/perl-5.8.0-55jpp.src.rpm


> A quick question about SRPMs ...  when an RPM has patches that have been
> applied to it -- like patch 12 of the Mandrake 9 RPM -- are those
> patches accessible as discrete patches in the SRPM?  I.e. would I be
> able to easily grab the SRPM and pull out just that one patch to look at
> or apply somewhere else?

Yes, the SRPMs always have the original source of the package, as it's
distributed by the authors, plus whatever patches.  The build process
adds the patches before building the software.  This is the "pristine
sources" concept, allowing people to see exactly how a modified package
was built, and rebuild it exactly.

If you download an SRPM -- such as the one linked to above -- and
install it it with "rpm -i", the patches will go in the SOURCES
directory along with the .tar.bz2 of the original perl source.  You can
then look at the .spec file (in the SPECS subdirectory) to see how
they're applied.  All I did was add the patch from Mandrake to the Red
Hat RPM spec file (it's now Patch21).  This way, I get a perl that
behaves exactly like the stock perl in RHL 8, except for the one change
I made.

Of course, the one downside to using custom RPMs of things like perl is
that when the distribution releases errata or updates, you have to
re-edit the .spec file to add your patches again, and rebuild.  But it's
still a nice system overall.

--Jeremy