[CentOS] Building a newer glibc RPM for CentOS 6 and installing into an alternate path

Tue Mar 31 16:12:41 UTC 2015
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 9:47 PM, Alfred von Campe <alfred at von-campe.com> wrote:
>
>> Tell your vendor you want a centos 6 version of the library, it's really
>> not a huge ask, esp if you are paying them. If they say no, do a new
>> install of centos 7 and run it on a different box. It's the only reasonable
>> thing to do, and if you do anything else and make anyone else support it,
>> you are a bad person.
>
> I’m not quite ready to move to CentOS 7 yet.  I would have to upgrade about
> 80 desktops, a couple of dozen VMs, and a handful of servers.  That’s after
> some extensive testing to make sure all our applications and cross compilers
> run on CentOS 7.  I realize the dependency hell a newer version of glib would
> cause, but I want to at least try it.

Isn't this the problem that docker was invented to solve?

> Forget I ever said I wanted to replace glibc.  Assume it’s a different
> library or application.  I guess what I really need to know is how to
> rebuild a source RPM after modifying the installation path.  A quick
> peek at the spec file for glibc did not reveal any easy options, but
> then again I don’t really speak the RPM spec file language.

If you build a stock rpm - or just grab an existing binary rpm you can
install the files in a different location with:

cd  /some/location
rpm2cpio some_package.rpm | cpio -idmv --no-absolute-filenames
(that's sort of routine for debugging cores from a different system....)
But I'd expect some close coupling between the compiler and glibc too,
so you probably can't compile a new version either without installing
newer tools too.

What kind of application is this?   Would it be practical to run it
remotely via ssh or a remote X window so you would only need one or a
few systems capable of running it?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com