do we need patch-native ?

do we need patch-native ?

[Frans Meulenbroeks]

Hi,

I had to do a build on OpenSuse 11.3 today, and it failed building
quilt-native (0.46-r2)

Root cause is that quilt configure tries to find whether patch is
installed and has a version > 2.4
It does so by calling patch --version and extract the version string from it.

The patch from 11.3 identifies itself as:
GNU patch 2.6.1.81-5b68
However the quilt configure script expected to find output like:
patch 2.6 (which is what I get on my ubuntu 10.4 version).

I see several possible options to fix this:
- make a package patch-native, so we can use our own patch
- patch quilt so its configure can deal with both patch version strings

Problem with the latter is that I have no idea how many other recipes
will have a similar test (and definitely they are not all triggered by
the images I regularly build.
Therefore I think I have a preference to introduce patch-native, but I
would like to hear how you guys & gals think about this, and whether
you see other options.

Best regards, Frans

Re: do we need patch-native ?

[Gary Thomas]

On 10/13/2010 08:12 AM, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I had to do a build on OpenSuse 11.3 today, and it failed building
> quilt-native (0.46-r2)
>
> Root cause is that quilt configure tries to find whether patch is
> installed and has a version>  2.4
> It does so by calling patch --version and extract the version string from it.
>
> The patch from 11.3 identifies itself as:
> GNU patch 2.6.1.81-5b68
> However the quilt configure script expected to find output like:
> patch 2.6 (which is what I get on my ubuntu 10.4 version).
>
> I see several possible options to fix this:
> - make a package patch-native, so we can use our own patch
> - patch quilt so its configure can deal with both patch version strings
>
> Problem with the latter is that I have no idea how many other recipes
> will have a similar test (and definitely they are not all triggered by
> the images I regularly build.
> Therefore I think I have a preference to introduce patch-native, but I
> would like to hear how you guys&  gals think about this, and whether
> you see other options.

Sounds like quilt's configure script is broken.  Such behaviour
should not be catered to - it should be fixed.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
------------------------------------------------------------

Re: do we need patch-native ?

[Frans Meulenbroeks]

2010/10/13 Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com>:
> On 10/13/2010 08:12 AM, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
>>

>
> Sounds like quilt's configure script is broken.  Such behaviour
> should not be catered to - it should be fixed.

Actually this was detected on an older version; just noticed it was
already fixed in july:
http://cgit.openembedded.org/cgit.cgi/openembedded/commit/?id=e05f5e4e8f023aea355943a1356dbb14226625e0

Guess the person who reported this to me needs a newer tree (or at
least a newer quilt recipe)

Frans.

Re: do we need patch-native ?

[Alexander Stohr]

Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:

> I had to do a build on OpenSuse 11.3 today, and it failed building
> quilt-native (0.46-r2)
> Root cause is that quilt configure tries to find whether patch is
> installed and has a version > 2.4

that whole setup and the files you mentioned for a certain reason
are looking quite familiar to me.

probably you will soon see things like this one for patchutils as well:

http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/openembedded-devel/2010-October/025087.html

variants of this line of code might help in the topic pretty generically:

  aclocal --version | head -n 1 | sed -e "s/^.*[^[:digit:]\.]//g"

this should give you the tail of the first version line starting with the first character qualifying as a digit. the result might be e.g. "1.10.1".

in fact i would rather prefer external tools that really only provide their version number on a single line by using a specific option and a full lengthy copyright/info notice when using some other option - just thinking about what makes the life of script coder much simpler.

as seen in other notes for autoconf scripts its often resolved as two variants where the $1 value determines if $2 or $3 is the desired result.
basically i would prefer having patch-native as this will provide a very well known reproducible environment dropping all such nasties and even covering the case where there is no such tool present at all. it might be a slight effort to maintain such a recipe but it will definitely kill the cross over amount of combination resulting from some 200 possible build platforms and some 50..500 recipes making use of the --version option of whatever tool is in question.

regards, Alex.
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Re: do we need patch-native ?

[Alexander Stohr]

there are cases where the machine readability
of such version information lines
migrates towards a mess of parsing efforts:

GNU ld (GNU Binutils; openSUSE 11.3) 2.20.0.20100122-6
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