On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 Eric Herman wrote: > To your desire: running modified versions of programs, this I do. The > package-users fork on github is very friendly to running my own patches. > There is a "build" script which untars the source in the "src" directory > and then looks for a "patches" directory with patches to apply > and applies any it finds.
Okay, that's nice to hear. The majority of people seem to prefer no or minimal patches. It's nice to run across others who want to customize. > Many times I've seen my patches continue to apply cleanly to new > versions of software, with only changes in line-offsets. Of course, > sometimes even a bug-fix version bump will require a minor re-work of a > patch -- or perhaps even a major one. I agree, if you want to run your > own patches which are not queued upstream, there's some maintenance > burden ... that's probably okay. Are there any tools out there to help with the maintenance? Does patch or another tool work in the line-offsets case? So far, I've been taking others' patches (unless they're specifically for the version I'm using) and making them by hand and then creating a new patch for them. For instance, there's a patch for FLTK that creates a gradient theme. The patch was for a more current snapshot not the major release, so I went in and applied by hand and created a new patch that works against the 1.3 release version. Was debating with some of my own patches whether it's easier to use patch or to attempt to use a tool like sed or perl to search and replace code. The nice thing about the sed replacement approach is that location doesn't matter. > I can only speak for myself, but I started down the LFS path in > part because I couldn't figure out how to rebuild a package and get it > installed correctly on an out-of-the-box distro a long time ago. I had > written the (trivial) patch to add the behavior that I wanted, but I > couldn't work through the build process of the program. That was the > first step down the road of thinking that it wasn't enough for me to > *use* open source, if I wanted to contribute, I had to be confident that > I could build everything I was using. I feel the same way. I'd like to be able to build what I can from scratch so that I can go in and modify should anything go wrong with the program or if I find a bug. I build a lot of programs cross-platform (on Windows, FreeBSD and Linux), so the majority of programs I build usually fail to build out of the box on at least one system. So far, I've only been building applications that would probably best fall under the BLFS category. I'd like to eventually get the basic stuff (applications in the LFS category) built from scratch as well. I think I'll need to do more research and reading before I'd be comfortable with trying that. I've been looking at some distributions that use alternatives to glibc and building a system like that might be an interesting experience. Sincerely, Laura -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
