[packagers] SPEC files for several catalyst (perl) related packages.

[Dag Wieers]

On Fri, 28 Dec 2007, Alessandro Forghieri wrote:

> Starting a Catalyst project, I needed to set it up in a controlled way
> on my target platform (Centos5). rpmforge does contain a starter kit,
> but it is far from complete.  I have therefore generated  42 SPEC files
> for the packages I was missing (so far, they are the one required to
> complete the tutorial - list appended).
>
> Most of them are automatic gruntwork made by cpanflute2, untouched.
> There are a few snags though:

Hi Alessandro,

We have our own script to generate perl SPEC files (that work on older
RHEL releases as well). We prefer to use those SPEC files because they
follow the same format and therefor allow us to make future modifications
to our script and regenerate them.

So I am interested to add the list of perl packages that you require to
RPMforge, but it won't be the exact SPEC files that you just added here.

However in case I have problems, having these SRPMs will certainly help
me to make better decisions or find fixes.

(Although I fear that some modules cannot practically be build or
installed on a RHEL5 system. I remember having tried to package the
complete set of Catalyst packages and was unable to make it all work)


> i) often (and annoyingly) the automatically generated SPEC created an
> RPM that installed everything under /var/tmp. I edited the offending
> macro out and rebuilt, but the reason why  beats me.

No experience with that.


> ii) At the moment catalyst requires a DBI version which is higher than
> the one in the official repos, so I rebuilt it. Because a (fake)
> dependency from Win32::ODBC kept popping up (and because DBI.spec from
> other distros are intricated beasts) I ended up creating a fake
> perl-fake-Win32-ODBC that justs fulfills the dependency;

We remove the code that causes the requirement to be added or we change
the automatic dependency generation to omit the wrong dependency.


> iii) perl-Test-Simple and perl-Tie-RefHash  have to be forced, as they
> conflict on mapages from the perl RPM.

Yes, we sadly cannot do that (and that might be the reason why we do not
offer some perl packages: we cannot satisfy the dependencies).


> iv) the autorequires phase of some packages kept inserting bogus or
> unfulfillable references, mostly to core perl packages or to perl
> itself. Rather than forcing installation I squelched the autorequire
> phase, which is rather brutal - but works :) .

I am interested to see how you do that. However if it goes against some
general expectations I cannot perform brutal things :-)


> As what above makes plain, I'm no RPM wizard and I am sure this work is
> just a stub, however (given the incredible intricacy of setting up a
> Catalyst starter set: the full required package list exceeds 131 rpms) I
> think it would be a valuable rpmforge addition, especially if fronted by
> a (say) Catalyst-Tutorial package that pulled all the other guys in
> (just a thought).

Although I can understand from a user perspective that having all these
packages available, I personally blame the developers for not being able
to provide the things that I want to provide.

If software (or perl modules) have too complicated requirements it can
become difficult (or even impossible) to package the software. The
solution is to make developers understand that (and not trying to force
things on a system that was not designed for it).


> If anybody is interested to pick this up let me know. The spec list is
> appended (all builds are at number 8 because that's cpanflute2's default)

What a strange default :)

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]