[Rpm-maint] better way to port packages to new architectures

Kamil Dudka kdudka at redhat.com
Fri Apr 5 13:06:23 UTC 2013


Hi RPM hackers,

Dennis Gilmore routed me to this mailing-list with my question.  In order to 
fix the following bugs:

    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=924967
    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=925048

... I asked upstream to use autoconf-2.69+ for making the tarballs from now
on and got an interesting answer:

    http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/acl-devel/2013-04/msg00003.html

The problem is that the recommended solution (asking upstream to use a newer 
autoconf) is a one-shot solution.  It needs to be done per each single package 
and it will need to be done again when we decide to support yet another 
architecture.

Running autoreconf during build (the 2nd recommended solution) is error-prone.  
It can easily pull in bugs that do not exist in the upstream tarballs, which 
themselves are extensively tested before they are declared stable.  You can 
take the following bug as an example:

    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=669048

Gentoo maintains a simple package sys-devel/gnuconfig that contains only 
config.{sub,guess}, which are used to replace the files provided in the 
upstream tarballs by their build system.

Could you please consider using a similar approach for RPM?

Thanks in advance!

Kamil


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