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Mon Dec 16 21:23:33 2002 UTC (21 years, 6 months ago) by matthew
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First version.  Needs more information somewhere, I'm sure.

1: <html> 2: <head> 3: <title>The LON-CAPA systemperl HOW-TO</title> 4: </head> 5: <body> 6: 7: <h1>The LON-CAPA systemperl HOW-TO</h1> 8: 9: The LON-CAPA systemperl rpm holds all of the perl modules required by LON-CAPA 10: but not a part of LON-CAPA. Additionally, other libraries have been included 11: as well. 12: This document describes in some detail the commands and 13: processes necessary to build a systemperl rpm. 14: My goal in writing this document is to never, ever have to do this again. 15: The difficulty is not simply the tedium involved in determining the 16: dependencies and build/install orders of the packages. 17: The real chore is the severity of an error - if the systemperl rpm is not 18: complete, LON-CAPA will not work properly. 19: 20: Fun Fact:emacs thinks 'systemperl' is a misspelling of 'distemper'. 21: 22: 23: <ol> 24: 25: <li>Find a machine to build on</li> 26: 27: In the case of the 3.5 systemperl, we were still support Red Hat 6.2, so 28: we needed two machines. The best situation would be to have a clean install 29: of RedHat and LON-CAPA (fully updated) installed in it as well. This is easy 30: for RedHat 7.3 but less easy for RedHat 6.2. 31: For the latter case, I used data.lite.msu.edu. This caused some problems so 32: you should thoroughly test your rpm by doing a few test installations on 33: little-used machines - preferably access servers that are not used regularly. 34: 35: 36: <li>Set up your work environment</li> 37: 38: You will need to set up directories. I used <tt>/root/systemperl/</tt> 39: as my base directory on data.lite.msu.edu. I had to make the following 40: directories: 41: <pre> 42: mkdir /root/systemperl 43: mkdir /root/systemperl/modules 44: mkdir /root/systemperl/root 45: mkdir /root/systemperl/root/usr 46: mkdir /root/systemperl/oldrpm 47: mkdir /root/systemperl/oldrpm/var 48: mkdir /root/systemperl/oldrpm/var/lib 49: mkdir /root/systemperl/oldrpm/var/lib/rpm 50: </pre> 51: The <tt>rpm</tt> directory is required by rpm but it can't seem to make 52: the directory itself. Fun Fact: rpm --usage causes a segfault on 53: RedHat 7 systems. 54: 55: 56: <li>Get the old systemperl</li> 57: 58: Typically found living somewhere on Zaphod. I suggest, as root, doing 59: 60: <pre> 61: find /home -name "*systemperl*" 62: </pre> 63: 64: The rest of this document assumes you're working with 65: <tt>LON-CAPA-systemperl-3.4-1.i386.rpm</tt> as the previous version. 66: The new version will be <tt>LON-CAPA-systemperl-3.5-1.i386.rpm.</tt> 67: 68: 69: <li>Figure out what was in the old rpm contains</li> 70: 71: Extract the rpm to a test directory. I suggest 72: <tt>/root/systemperl/oldrpm</tt> 73: <pre> 74: rpm --install --force --noscripts --nodeps -r /root/systemperl/oldrpm LON-CAPA-systemperl-3.4-1.i386.rpm 75: </pre> 76: List all the files (ls -lR) and see what perl modules and libraries are in it. 77: You will probably need to get all of these modules and libraries. 78: 79: To get a list of new modules you may need to get, grep the loncapa source tree 80: using the following simple command: 81: <pre> 82: find /home/matthew/loncapa -name "*.p[lm]" -exec grep "^use " {} \; \ 83: | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | perl -pe 's/([\;]|\s+$)//g; $_.="\n"' | \ 84: grep -v ^Apache | sort -u 85: </pre> 86: 87: 88: <li>Get source code for libraries you need to include</li> 89: 90: You may need to include libgd or some other library in the systemperl. 91: Google for the library and seek out the home page of the project developing it. 92: You'll probably wind up with a tarball instead of an rpm. (If you can find an 93: rpm for all the systems you have to support I suggest just requiring people to 94: install the rpm directly instead of repackaging it (which I won't talk about).) 95: So untar it and, if you're lucky, it will use a configure script to determine 96: how to compile the package. For example: 97: <pre> 98: tar zxf gd-2.0.9.tar.gz 99: cd gd-2.0.9 100: ./configure --prefix /root/systemperl/root/usr/ 101: make 102: make install 103: </pre> 104: 105: If you find later that some perl modules are being compiled against this 106: library (such as <tt>GD.pm</tt>), you will want to be sure you have this 107: installed properly on the machine you're building on. I suggest: 108: <pre> 109: rm -rf gd-2.0.9 110: tar zxf gd-2.0.9.tar.gz 111: cd gd-2.0.9 112: ./configure 113: make 114: make install 115: </pre> 116: 117: 118: <li>Get new versions of perl modules</li> 119: 120: I used CPAN. 121: <pre> 122: # perl -MCPAN -e shell 123: </pre> 124: By issuing 'get <modulename>' commands you can grab all the files you need. 125: 126: However, where the modules end up is another story. The default storage 127: place for modules is <tt>/root/.cpan/sources/...</tt>. 128: I have not found a reliable way to set this supposedly configurable option. 129: Issue a "<tt>o conf</tt>" to see what options are available in the CPAN shell. 130: One method might be issuing the following commands (outside of the CPAN shell): 131: <pre> 132: cd /root/.cpan 133: find . -name "*.tar.gz" -exec rm {} \; 134: perl -MCPAN -e shell 135: # Do your module downloading 136: find . -name "*.tar.gz" -exec mv {} /root/systemperl/modules \; 137: </pre> 138: Do not simply issue the above commands without knowing what they do. 139: 140: The method I used was slightly more iterative, where I copied each *.tar.gz out 141: as it came in. 142: 143: 144: <li>Compile the Perl Modules</li> 145: 146: For each module you grabbed, you'll need to issue the following commands 147: to compile it: 148: <pre> 149: tar zxf <modulename>.tar.gz 150: cd <modulename> 151: perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/root/systemperl/root 152: make 153: make test 154: make install 155: </pre> 156: The <tt>make test</tt> is probably not necessary in some cases. Some packages 157: require information from you during the <tt>perl Makefile.PL</tt> step. 158: Some packages will complain that you don't have prerequisite packages 159: installed. 160: If you have already downloaded these packages you will need to install them on 161: the live system you are building the package on. For example, GDGraph will not 162: compile without GD being installed on the machine. So you must build GD.pm 163: and install it on the current machine by doing 164: <pre> 165: cd GD-<version> 166: perl Makefile.PL 167: make 168: make install 169: </pre> 170: before you attempt to compile GDGraph.pm. 171: Note: There is no <tt>make test</tt> for GD.pm. 172: 173: Of course, GD depends on the library libgd.so. Thus, we need to have 174: installed libgd prior to all of this. There is no automatic way of 175: settling these dependencies at this time. 176: 177: 178: <li>Package it together</li> 179: 180: Ahh, building an rpm. Legends tell of days when you had to work long and 181: hard to build an rpm. These days we have Scott Harrison's <tt>make_rpm.pl</tt> 182: script which does the hard work for us. Since you're likely to have to 183: do this a lot, making a shell script might be wise: 184: <pre> 185: [root@data systemperl]# cat make_systemperl.sh 186: find ./root | perl make_rpm.pl LON-CAPA-systemperl 3.5 '' '' ./root 187: </pre> 188: 189: NOTE: A modification had to be made to make_rpm.pl in order for it to 190: accept a name of LON-CAPA-systemperl. By default the make_rpm.pl script does 191: not allow for non-alphanumeric characters in the package name. This bites. 192: So you'll want to bypass that test in the make_rpm.pl script. 193: 194: The invocation of make_rpm.pl given above omits a lot of options. 195: If you need to do something special with your systemperl rpm I suggest you 196: read the help available on make_rpm.pl. 197: 198: 199: <li>Test installation</li> 200: 201: So, you've made an rpm. You should be proud. 202: You could be even prouder if you knew the thing worked. 203: So find a machine to test on. I suggest either a little-used access server 204: or a new machine you don't intend to keep around. 205: 206: Do not simply install it on the machine you built on and decide it works. 207: The process above only gives you the modules LON-CAPA depends on. It does 208: not tell you which modules those modules depend on. Only actual use will 209: tell you if your system is complete. 210: 211: Install your rpm on the system 212: <pre> 213: rpm --install --force LON-CAPA-systemperl-3.5.-1.rpm 214: </pre> 215: and install the new loncapa. I suggest testing the following components: 216: <ul> 217: <li>kerberos 4 authentication</li> 218: <li>kerberos 5 authentication</li> 219: <li>spreadsheet, specifically excel output of spreadsheets</li> 220: <li>statistics, specifically the degree of difficulty graphs</li> 221: <li>A randomlabel problem</li> 222: <li>search and search results</li> 223: <li>enrollment upload</li> 224: </ul> 225: If there are any problems you have likely forgotten a library or have a bad 226: version of the library. 227: 228: </ol> 229: </body> 230: </html>