Patch for generic-build-script

Igor Pechtchanski pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
Thu Aug 12 20:55:00 GMT 2004


On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Robb, Sam wrote:

> > Good catch.  I'd rather add the '-r' ('--no-run-if-empty') flag to the
> > all of the xargs invocations, though.
>
> Told you I wasn't familiar with xargs :-)  I really need to spend some
> time and get more comfortable with it.

It was actually right there on the xargs man page... ;-)  Ok, so it's
settled -- I'll change your patch to do that instead of the -exec option.

> > > - When compressing files using gzip as part of an install, adds
> > >   the -f flag to the gzip arguments to force compression.
> > >
> > > -Samrobb
> >
> > Why?  Is it just to force compression of files that wouldn't benefit
> > from it?  Frankly, I'm not clear on why this is useful...
>
> I ran into this becuase gzip was complining that a file had "too
> many links" to compress.  It also forces compression when the
> resulting output file already exists.  I was running into the
> first problem - e2fsprogs installs some man pages, then creates
> hard link to some of the man pages under a different name.

Ah, I see now.

> I'll be honest in that I'm not positive this is the right thing
> to do in these situations ().

Yeah, I'm also not sure that the sledgehammer approach of "gzip -f" is
appropriate here...  In other words, the complaint *is* legitimate in both
cases -- you really don't want to compress something if it's already been
compressed by the upstream build, and breaking upstream hard links may not
be a good idea.

> If I understnad things correctly, the warning is there to let you know
> that you're breaking a hard link; but I'm not sure that's really an
> issue, aside from creating a slightly larger binary package.

Well, the thing about the generic build script is that it's really a
template, and you can change it locally to correspond to your particular
package.  Only changes that are generic enough or are harmless (i.e.,
won't break other builds) should go into the common script.  I'm not
convinced that this particular change (i.e., adding -f to gzip) is
generally harmless...  If you still want to do this for your package,
though, please feel free.

I'll apply the rest of the patch now.
	Igor
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