Stas Bekman wrote:
> When you install gcc*.rpm, do you complain about it? mostly not. Why?
> because it's something that use without special needs. It's easy to make a
> mod_perl RPM to handle some basic stuff. But if you are a real user of
> mod_perl you want to discover many of its not so strightforward features,
> then RPM doesn't fit you and you have to roll you own build
>
> RedHat makes RPMs the way it find correct. If it doesn't fit your needs
> make your own RPM and contribute it to both RH and us, so others will be
> able to use it. It's so simple.
What I really need is something that I can just install on each server and have
a copy of mod_perl which will work out of the box.. I'm not going to be hacking
around with the mod_perl source in the production servers. If I'm going to do
that, it will be on my development box.
I'm just afraid that because people have been talking about so many problems
with the Red Hat RPM and it's using mod_perl as an Apache DSO which is not
recommended, I'm going to run into stupid problems somewhere.
> Even better give us a SRPM, the user will have to build it himself, but
> once he build ot from sources, it's promised that everything would work.
> All it takes is:
>
> rpm --rebuild somepackage.src.rpm
This produces a RPM built on the user's machine in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS and the
whole build tree in /usr/src/redhat/BUILD, but when using a BuildRoot (which
every package I've seen does) these /usr/src/redhat/BUILD files are going to be
setup to install into the buildroot of /tmp/whatever, not where you actually
want them.
Perhaps instruct the user to do this, if they want to run their own build of
mod_perl using the RPM as a starting point:
rpm -i somepackage.src.rpm
edit /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/somepackage.spec to remove BuildRoot line
rpm -bi /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/somepackage.spec
This way the user does not get an RPM built on their system, but the build tree
in /usr/src/redhat/BUILD is setup to install into their live system (and just
did).
> I think it would help. If you succeed to build a good SRPM for a general
> purpose usage, we ether can ask RH to put it in, or can put it on
> sourcegarden or perl.apache.org - it's not an issue. Thanks!
How about this way of thinking about creating an RPM: We think of mod_perl as a
special DSO that we are not really allowed to use as a DSO, so we really want
to just provide another Apache binary that has mod_perl built in.. So, when you
want to enable mod_perl instead if inserting a "LoadModule" line in httpd.conf,
you just change from "httpd" to "httpd-perl" in the apachectl script. The
advantage is that this one binary can share the existing Apache documentation
and DSO's from the RedHat Apache RPM. We just need to install what's different
for the mod_perl binary, such as all of the Perl modules and the mod_perl
specific documentation.
Of course, if I distribute the RPM, the SRPM will come along too.
- David Harris
Principal Engineer, DRH Internet Services
