Hi there, On Sun, 21 Dec 2025, jbk wrote:
With BackkupPC-XS-0.63rc1 installed building BackupPC-4.4.1rc1 stalls at this point in the build process: ... + cd BackupPC-4.4.1rc1 + /usr/bin/perl configure.pl --batch --backuppc-user=backuppc ... ... ... --no-set-perms --uid-ignore You need to run makeDist first to create a tarball release that includes an updated configure.pl.? After you unpack the tarball, run configure.pl from there. ... So the answer is there but I'm not sure how to fix.
The Perl script makeDist has some documentation at the top which might help you. Basically the idea is that when you 'build from source' (as opposed to installing from a distribution's package) you can check out the source from Github, change the current working directory to that which was newly created (or updated) by the checkout, and then in that directory run makeDist. This creates a sub-directory in which it will create a tarball. You can use the tarball to install on the machine on which it was created, but after creating the tarball you can copy it to another (simlar) machine to install from. It's the *only* file you need to copy to do that install so it can save a lot of effort for example in cases where there are many machines to be upgraded. In the case of something like BackupPC of course that may seldom be the case. At the time of creating the tarball, decisions for example about where things will be placed in the filesystem are put off until the time of installation (at least in the case of BackupPC) by some changes to the source code to replace occurrences of paths like '/usr/share/BackupPC' with '__INSTALLDIR__'. When you run the configuration script at the time of installation these are then replaced with something chosen by the person or script installing on that machine. Most of the switches in your 'configure.pl' command above are doing that sort of thing. Note that thus far we've talked ony about installing from a tarball. That will usually be a file with an extension of '.tgz' or '.tar.gz' All you need to do is extract the tarball into a new directory (using 'tar') and follow the installation instructions you'll find in there. After that there may still be things to do like getting the system to start the utility at boot, if that's needed, and some configuration. Many Linux distributions (like Red Hat and Debian) have their own ways of doing similar things, but instead of producing a tarball they have chosen to use some sort of package manager. For Debian that is 'apt' (Advanced Package Tool), for Red Hat it's 'rpm' (RPM Package Manager). You have to use the package tool to do the install, not 'tar' etc., and you can usually ignore the install instructions in the tarball as the package manager does all that (and probably more, like setting up systemd stuff and whatever). The distribution maintainers do a lot more than just run 'makeDist'. Not only do they usually make changes to things like directory layout and configuration scripts, they may tweak things to work//work better with other packages in their distribution, fix problems which aren't fixed 'upstream', and things like that. The end result will not be a tarball, but in the case of Debian a '.deb' file and in the case of Red Hat an '.rpm' file. I believe you're trying to create a Red Hat RPM. It's decades since I used a Red Hat system so I'm not sure what's necessary to create a RPM package from the BackupPC source. I'd like to refresh myself but just now I can't spare the time as I'm up to my ears in rsync-bpc. I'll be happy to make any changes in the BackupPC repository in Github if it's found to be necessary to support the creation of a particular package. Richard (see the thread 'BackupPC-XS 0.63 RC1 test failure') is the person who will probably know best. In that thread he's working on BackupPC-XS, it will be a similar process to package BackupPC itself. Things can get very messy if you try to mix the approaches (tarball or RPM or DEB). Don't do it unless you're familiar with the differences, or you're prepared to do some possibly extensive tidying up later. If I've completely missed the point I'm sorry, but I think this needs to be written down somewhere anyway. -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
