Hi,
On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 01:23:05PM -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:
I wanted to install the latest Subversion, version 1.5.1, on CentOS 5. [...] I attempted to build it and it failed due to a missing "perl-devel" package. Some investigation indicates that somewhere in Fedora's history the headers and development utilities in Perl got broken out into a separate subpackage. [...]
This is mostly a heads-up to others that might run into this, but I'm wondering what the best way to deal with it is. Should I comment out the BuildReq, or create a virtual package that provides perl-devel and depends on the existing perl package?
I'd go for the latter. That is how I also deal with python-devel/python(abi)/python-abi for older CentOSes or xfree86 -> xorg changes (see the compat package at ATrpms). It is the cleanest and less maintenance needing solution, as you will not need to touch the subversion specfile, at least not in this part.
In general I try to package up things for the latest bits of CentOS/RHEL/etc (which is indeed RawHide, even if it is years before it shows up as a CentOS release) and try (as much as possible) to keep the same specfile for elder environments with virtual provides, stub packages etc.
But a perl-devel stub would be nice for CentOS plus/extras and certainly for rpmrepo - which should also ship a newer subversion package in its replacement tagged repos.
BTW did you check Dag's repo for a CentOS packages subversion? I just did, it doesn't yet carry 1.5.x, but I'm sure if you ask Dag it will soon do (although I think currently Dag enjoys some well deserved off-the-net-time).