Patching RH SRPMS was: Re: [WBEL-users] Glade Freezes

Kirby C. Bohling kbohling at birddog.com
Wed Jun 1 20:58:58 CDT 2005


On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 08:29:24PM -0500, John Morris wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-05-31 at 17:06, Fernando Apesteguía wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Somebody reproduces this?
> 
> Yup, see RH bugzilla #153977.  Appears Johnny Hughes at Centos already
> reported it and a parsley at linuxjedi.org has posted a patch.  Since RH
> isn't likely to issue a fixed package since their build worked I had
> better incorporate that patch and rebuild.

[stealing the thread...]

John,

    Just curious, what's the threshold for patching a RedHat
package?  I'm fairly sure you backed away from doing this for
several other (I remember at least one you publically thought out
loud about it) packages earlier.  You had a patch you were applying
to local packages to fix some type of GUI interface bug (I forget
exactly what it was, something stupid in a Window manager if I
remember correctly).  However, you avoided releasing that to the
public.

    I kinda like the "absolutely RedHat modulo artwork and some
text".  I actually felt kinda uncomfortable about CentOS when Johnny
mentioned it earlier (it seems kinda out of the spirit of a
rebuild).  This seems like a trivial but from reading the patch.  I
can't say I object, but I'm kinda surprised if RedHat doesn't feel
like rolling out a new package that you feel the need to.

    Goodness knows I wish RedHat would release any number of
packages more often when they fix a trivial bug (ghostscript using
/dev/random instead of /dev/urandom, meanwhile the kernel had a bug
that meant /dev/random couldn't add entropy to the pool if the pool
ever emptied, so ghostscript would hang indefinitely if it was used
in large batch runs is the one I found the most irritating).

    Okay, I'm of two minds on it.  I see it as really convienent for
trivial patches, but I worry about the definition of "trivial".
Just thought I'd ask.  You're pretty sane, so maybe an explaination
will resolve my issues.

    Thanks,
        Kirby



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