[CentOS-devel] Interested in IA64 build.

On Monday, September 24, 2012 08:36:38 AM Lamar Owen wrote:
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> In any case, the local rebuild of CentOS 5.5 using the SLC5.4 binaries as 'seed' started Saturday evening; as of 8:20A today it has successfully rebuilt 443 source RPMS, producing 1243 binary RPMS, and have seen 35 packages fail thus far.  
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And an update.  Following an iterative process of building the failed packages as a set over and over against the 5.4 buildroot seed binaries, I was able to get it down to 118 source packages that failed to build, and 3,245 binaries successfully built.  Two of those packages blocked me from uprevving my buildroot to 5.5: chkconfig, and lvm2.  Since neither of those packages actually does any building, I seeded a 'reqs' repo with those two, plus the 32-bit valgraind-devel package, along with m4 1.4.8, and uprevved the buildroot (this is done by pointing the repos in the mock config to the newer binaries; mock configs are essentially modified yum configs, and work pretty much the same way, with quirks).  This brought the number of successfully rebuilt packages up to 3,389 binaries, with 81 failed builds.  Fortunately, none of the failed packages would prevent a yum update-style cross-grade from SLC 5.4 to CentOS 5.5. (the really key package that is still failing is anaconda; but that's not a big problem right now since I'm not going to try to spin media until I get up to 5.8, I just need to be careful about backups and archives of the built repos!).

If you want the gory details, I'll be glad to share, but the short and sweet of it is that I now have one Altix box running my own local rebuild of CentOS 5.5 on ia64.

I'm now dong a 'self-hosting' build of 5.5 using the previously built 5.5 binaries as the buildroot, and once that's done I'll update/cross-grade the buildhost to the self-hosted 5.5 and start on uprevving to 5.6.  The 5.5-> 5.6 upgrade wasn't the easiest one we've had, and I'm kindof dreading it in a way, but the process thus far has been very educational and enlightening when it comes to what kind of mechanics really go in to doing something like a rebuild of the upstream sources.

And many thanks to Karanbir and Johnny for the encouragement and assistance with the thought processes going into this.  While I'm not currently using the same mock version as CentOS is, nor am I using the same process and hooks, the insights they've provided have been key to getting this far.  And, of course, Russ Herrold's archived notes and correspondence were instrumental in me thinking I could even do such as thing as this in the first place.... thanks guys!