Friday 5th September 2008
Fedora Project
MattDomsch produced a list of packages with long-standing FTBFS (Fails To Build From Source) bugs, which were proposed to be removed from the distribution prior to the Fedora 10 release. None of my packages were on the list, but there were quite a few that looked important, either in themselves or as dependencies of other important packages.
One of these for instance was perl-MIME-Lite, for which Bug #449558 had remained unfixed since early June, which turns out to be a dependency of openoffice.org-devel and over 500 other packages. The fix was trivial: rawhide's new rpm doesn't like constructs like this:
%check || : make test
which is OK because this syntax is only used to provide support for really old versions of rpm that don't know what a %check section is in a spec file. By really old I mean even older than the one from Red Hat Linux 9, the oldest release I package perl modules for. So although I don't own the package, I do have commit access and so I fixed it. The FTBFS bug that is. There are still plenty of rpmlint warnings and spec file cleanups that could be attended to, but I leave that to the package's actual owner.