Preferred Method for Recompiling Apache on FC3?

[D. D. Brierton]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 20:26 -0600, Eric Vought wrote:

> I am going to need to rebuild Apache shortly to change the suexec
> docroot to /home, in line with what VirtualMin requires. This, in and of
> itself, does not scare me. What does make me a bit nervous is the
> prospect of doing this without breaking all of the various RPM
> dependencies and hosing my system the next time the httpd package is
> updated.
> 
> Is there a preferred method for rebuilding Apache on FC3? If I install
> from source, how do I get all of the other packages which depend on it
> to work correctly? In the past, I would have built the custom version in
> /usr/local, but nothing (e.g.: the init scripts, WebMin, etc) expects to
> find it there. If I modify the build configuration in the SRPM and
> rebuild/reinstall, how do I keep a YUM update from clobbering the
> customized binary? Is there a "yum

I am very interested to hear what others more knowledgeable than myself
have to say about this. I personally think that your best bet is to
build custom RPMs yourself, rather than just compiling from source and
installing via the "configure ; make ; make install" route.

You'll still need to worry about whether updates from Fedora would
replace your customised packages. One possibility would be to set a high
epoch number on your custom RPMs, so that updates from Fedora never
replace them. That might cause dependency problems with other packages
that you don't want or need to build yourself, but maybe it won't.
Someone more knowledgeable about RPM and how epoch works might be able
to enlighten us. The trouble is that you will need to regularly manually
track the Fedora updates for security and bug fixes, and manually
rebuild your RPMs with your custom spec file from the updated SRPMs.

I don't see any other convenient route to doing what you want to. If you
start compiling key components of FC yourself and installing them
without using RPM you're going to end up in a world of pain.

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren at dzr-web.com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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