On Friday, September 28, 2012 01:26:12 AM Lamar Owen wrote:
> While rebuilding with an SL base would likely have worked pretty much the same way, since all but a handful of my other machines are running CentOS of some version I decided I'd rather go that route.  If you're interested in following the progress of stepwise rebuilding up through 5.6, 5.7, and 5.8 on ia64, I'll be posting periodic updates to the centos-devel list.

> It has already been very educational, and has shed a lot of light on what kind of process rebuilding upstream's source packages is really like for the SL and CentOS teams.  And it's really nothing like you imagine it to be.

Being that it's been a full week, I thought I'd do a high-level update of where my rebuild project for ia64 stands.

Using publicly available information, knowledge gained from my own experience packaging PostgreSQL for five years, and the encouragement and 'hints' from several developers, I began two weeks ago the fairly involved process of rebuilding the EL5 sources (I used CentOS sources, but SL or SLF or SLC or upstream EL or Oracle or other EL5 sources would have worked fine) for IA64, starting with Scientific Linux CERN 5.4 as a base.

As I mentioned a while back, my thanks to the SL and SLC teams both for SL in general and for SLC for IA64 specifically.  As SLC support for IA64 stopped at 5.4, and since I have three pretty nice SGI Altix IA64 boxes that I really want to use, I decided to build up to the current EL5.8 level for IA64.  I know that upstream EL5.8 is available for IA64, but it costs quite a bit, and that cost is not in my current budget. 

In any case, I stepwise progressed from a CentOS 5.5 built with only SLC5.4 binaries as the buildroot seeds, to CentOS 5.5 built with primarily CentOS 5.5 binaries and some SLC5.4 seeds, to CentOS 5.5 built with almost entirely CentOS 5.5 binaries and a smattering of SLC5.4 seeds.  This was a full build, not just building changed packages, but building all packages from CentOS 5.5's os repo.

I then 'crossgraded'/upgraded a small test IA64 box from SLC5.4 to my own rebuild of CentOS 5.5 (I left my larger building box on SLC5.4, since it is successfully building things and I don't want to gratuitously break it).  This isn't actually as straightforward as you might think, and requires several steps and some careful thinking, especially when it comes to dealing with the yum configuration package.  And there are some packages that are epoch-munged to supercede all others, and those aren't too hard to 'upgrade' from with --oldpackage.

There are a few packages that are still from SLC 5.4 on my test system, but very few.  A few I haven't gotten to successfully rebuild yet, like perl-XML-Parser.  And a few are extra packages. But the core of the system, including the kernel, glibc, bash, gcc, etc are all locally rebuild CentOS 5.5 binaries.  That's a pretty satisfying feeling, really.

Once that tested out, I followed a procedure, which I posted to the centos-devel list, for stepwise building the 5.6 packages that were updated from 5.5 or were new to 5.6.  That build finished today, with just a few failures.

My test IA64 box is now up to my inhouse rebuild of CentOS 5.6, and the 5.7 packages that are either new or have changed since 5.6 are rebuilding now.

I thought some might be interested; if you're not, by all means feel free to delete.... :-)