On 06/09/2015 12:48 AM, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote: > 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. you might need to have it provide "less" though, to avoid unmet deps eg for man or gzip.