List of packages with arch-specific patches

jamespharvey20 · 2015-06-09 07:49:59

Considering moving over from Fedora, having just learned about how many Fedora-specific patches are in their repositories. (Installing vanilla glibc from source bricks my Fedora 22 installs, without incorporating the Fedora-specific patches - which was easy to do, but prefer not to...)

I'd much prefer to run cleaner vanilla packages, particularly so I can install from svn/git source to fix bugs I run into before they're released.

Hoping there is a list (or an easy way to get a list) of the packages that arch has put arch-specific patches into. i.e. Installing through pacman will be a modified version from the actual upstream release of that version. Totally OK to answer my question outside the context of AUR, because I suspect the list grows when including that.

Linux From Scratch has a list of what patches are required for their system. It's bash, bc memory leak, bzip2, coreutils, glibc, kbd backspace, mpfr, readline, and sysvinit. (Beyond Linux From Scratch has a lot more, and its "list" is visible at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/patches/blfs/ )

Hoping there's a (short) list like that for arch as well. Partially so if I'm installing unreleased source, I know whether I need to incorporate the arch-specific patches (like building my own package for packman) rather than just make install.

Last edited by jamespharvey20 (2015-06-09 07:55:06)

severach · 2015-06-09 08:24:07

Unpatched sources is a happy accident of the rolling release model and isn't particularly intentional. Point release distros need the complex layers of patches and backports to keep all the popular versions running. Arch only has 1 version--today's version!

Arch works well with git releases. Many packages use git as their primary method of retrieval.

Arch provides easy access to all package builds. From the package web page, pick a package of interest and look through the PKGBUILD for patches and other stuff. Instead of trying to go it alone from vanilla to the release version you can start with the release PKGBUILD and work backwards until you hit the minimal requirements.

This seems pedantically obvious to experienced Arch packagers but many distros make it so difficult to get the build instructions that you don't even think to look when a distro puts them all out for everyone to see.

runical · 2015-06-09 08:24:16

As far as I know, there is no such list for the official repositories (at least not on the wiki). However, the Arch philosophy is stay as close to upstream as possible, so the amount of Arch specific patches should be at a minimum. In order to see if there are patches, you can always check the PKGBUILD.

In case of the AUR, it is best practice to read the PKGBUILD before building. If you do this, you should know which patches are included.

P.S. If you are so inclined, you can always scour the ABS with a script and look for patches. If you do, you might want to make a wiki page out of it.

Last edited by runical (2015-06-09 08:24:58)

Spider.007 · 2015-06-09 10:09:58

I don't think you'll ever need to install unreleased sources as they end up in testing pretty quick. Have a look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System for tips how to modify the official packages.

As for the list, it's pretty easy to construct. The following is a list of core-packages that have .patch files included in their repo, with the number representing the number of patches:

for f in packages/*/repos/core-x86_64/*.patch; do f=${f#packages/}; echo ${f%%/*} ; done|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn

10 libsasl
9 systemd
6 make grub
7 linux-lts
4 libarchive crda
3 vi pam mdadm kbd isdn4k-utils iproute2
2 texinfo shadow openssl openssh nss nfs-utils gcc
1 xinetd wpa_supplicant usbutils rpcbind psmisc ppp pcre p11-kit openldap net-tools mpfr mkinitcpio-nfs-utils mkinitcpio-busybox m4 lvm2 logrotate linux linux-atm librpcsecgss libffi krb5 keyutils jfsutils iptables hdparm gzip grep glibc glib2 gdbm efibootmgr e2fsprogs coreutils bzip2 bridge-utils binutils bash gnutls

Last edited by Spider.007 (2015-06-09 11:11:30)

mauritiusdadd · 2015-06-09 10:43:37

Actually linux-lts has 7 patches (one has .diff suffix) and there is also gnutls

--edit: this should include them in the list

 for f in packages/*/repos/core-x86_64/*.{patch,diff}; do f=${f#packages/}; echo ${f%%/*} ; done|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn

Last edited by mauritiusdadd (2015-06-09 11:25:58)

Spider.007 · 2015-06-09 11:11:31

Good catch, I've updated my previous post.

Trilby · 2015-06-09 11:32:49

I suspect only a portion of those would even be arch-specific. Some upstream sources will release patches as bug fixes before bundling a new versioned source tarball.

Arch Linux

#1 2015-06-09 07:49:59

List of packages with arch-specific patches

#2 2015-06-09 08:24:07

Re: List of packages with arch-specific patches

#3 2015-06-09 08:24:16

Re: List of packages with arch-specific patches

#4 2015-06-09 10:09:58

Re: List of packages with arch-specific patches

#5 2015-06-09 10:43:37

Re: List of packages with arch-specific patches

#6 2015-06-09 11:11:31

Re: List of packages with arch-specific patches

#7 2015-06-09 11:32:49

Re: List of packages with arch-specific patches

Board footer