On 06/09/2015 12:33 AM, tony at softins.co.uk (Tony Mountifield) wrote: > In article <ml1jnh$afr$1 at softins.softins.co.uk>, > Tony Mountifield <tony at softins.co.uk> wrote: >> When I started using CentOS 6 instead of CentOS 5, I discovered that >> "less" no longer understood \< and \>, which I had been used to using >> since almost forever. >> >> Eventually research revealed that in the Fedora version on which >> RHEL 6 was based, "less" had been built with the PCRE regex library >> instead of a POSIX one. So instead of \< and \>, I had to use \b. >> >> I found a bugzilla entry about this, which showed that the change had >> been reverted in a later Fedora release. So I tested CentOS 7, and found >> "less" has been reverted to using POSIX regex, which I'm glad about. >> >> What I want to know is: do any repos have a replacement version of >> "less" for CentOS 6 that has been built with POSIX regex, so that >> I don't have to keep switching between the two styles when working >> on different CentOS versions? > > Well, after the deafening silence in response, I assumed the answer was "no", > so I downloaded the SRPMs of less for both C6 and C7, and did a comparison. > I found that it was easy to fix the C6 less to use the correct POSIX regex > engine as follows: > > 1. Copy less-394-search.patch from the C7 SRPM, and add it back into > less.spec as Patch2. > > 2. Remove the line "BuildRequires: pcre-devel". > > 3. Remove "--with-regex=pcre" from the %configure line in less.spec. > > 4. Change the release number. I changed 13 to 13posix, so that the resultant > RPMS have names like less-436-13posix.el6 instead of less-436-13.el6 > > 5. Rebuild RPMs and SRPM using "rpmbuild -ba less.spec". > > 6. Install using "yum localinstall". > > The resulting build of less works wonderfully on my C6 boxes, consistently > with the versions on C4, C5 and C7. > > I'm sure there must be other people who would find the corrected RPMs useful, > so my questions now are: > > a) Is there a contributors repo to which it would be appropriate to submit them? > > b) Is there a better way to number the release for this version? it may be better to change the package name to less-posix rather than change the release number, and have the new package conflict with less. That way once you've installed it, it won't get squashed by a yum update.