[Kolab-devel] PEAR packaging problems

Gunnar Wrobel wrobel at pardus.de
Thu Dec 4 06:53:59 CET 2008


We experienced some problems with PEAR packaging during preparations  
for the next Kolab server release. Maybe some packagers from other  
distros have additional insight or can make use of the information.

 From https://www.intevation.de/roundup/kolab/issue3260:

And in fact, looking at the PEAR packaging and installation mechanisms now I
tend to say that they use a somewhat broken concept since they  
directly install
from a tgz. And these tgz's are only installable as a package not when  
unpacked
-> this irritated Thomas and after checking this I definitely agree.

There are two ways around this:

1) Patching the installed files. As there is no compilation we could apply
patches in the RPM_BUILD_ROOT. I consider this to be bad monkey patching and
would like to avoid this. If I remember the chat with Thomas correctly he also
mentioned the same thing.

2) Completing the unpacked tgz with package.xml from upstream and  
using this for
installation. The drawback here is that it is somewhat complicated as you will
need to modify the packages spec file and add the package.xml once you  
decide a
package needs patching.

I consider solution 2) to be the more attractive one and I checked this in for
Kolab_Filter as an example now.

In general we should probably try to avoid patching and rather rely on  
upstream
releases. Especially for the Kolab_* packages this is a simple thing for me to
do. I could have also done this for the patch attached by Thomas here but I
choose not to for demonstration purposes on how to patch a PEAR package.

-- 
______ http://kdab.com _______________ http://kolab-konsortium.com _

p at rdus Kolab work is funded in part by KDAB and the Kolab Konsortium

____ http://www.pardus.de _________________ http://gunnarwrobel.de _
E-mail : p at rdus.de                                 Dr. Gunnar Wrobel
Tel.   : +49 700 6245 0000                          Bundesstrasse 29
Fax    : +49 721 1513 52322                          D-20146 Hamburg
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