Friday 26th October 2007
Fedora Project
It's been a busy week for me. I got down to the last three of my packages that needed rebuilding for BuildId inclusion, namely ORBit, gnome-libs, and libglade, which I'd held off on doing because I wanted to fix the license tags at the same time, and these packages were potentially troublesome mixed-license packages that would need detailed examination.
Then, at the start of the week, I received multi-arch conflict bug reports for libxml, ORBit, gnome-libs, and libglade. So I wanted to fix those too, which wasn't terribly difficult really but still time-consuming.
When I came to build the updated gnome-libs, I found it failed because of a compile error on ppc64. It turns out that the configure script for gnome-libs looks to see if umode_t is defined in the system header files and, if not, defines it as an int (it's used in the VFS layer). This doesn't cause a problem on x86 and ppc architectures, but on ppc64 there is a definition of umode_t (as an int) in a kernel header file that's pulled in via signal.h. The configure script doesn't find it because it doesn't check signal.h and so it ends up getting defined twice and causing a compile error. Fixing the configure script to include signal.h when checking for umode_t was enough to resolve the problem.
So eventually I got the packages built for Rawhide, but I'd missed the final freeze for Fedora 8. I wrote to the release engineering team to put my case for including the updates in Fedora 8 (BuildID and ppc64 builds being quite important) and it was agreed to include the new versions. Hopefully I won't need to touch any of these packages for some considerable time now.
Local Packages
Built RHEL/CentOS versions of the updated Fedora packages for libxml, ORBit, gnome-libs, and libglade
Updated perl-IO-Socket-SSL to 1.12