RPMs and patching

Question

I have 3 files (from here)that I have been given to install in an attempt to upgrade the compiler:

binutils-2.13.2.1-1.mipsel.rpm
binutils-2.13.2.1-1.src.rpm
binutils-2.13.2.1-r5900-7.diff.gz

I'm kinda fumbling around with this.

What I've done is:

rpm -i mipsel -vv
rpm -i src -vv

I have no idea what to do with the .diff.gz I understand it's a patch but don't really know how to deal with it.

Answer 1

Change to the toplevel source directory (the one containing the files COPYING, bfd and so on) and apply the patch:

zcat ../binutils-2.13.2.1-r5900-7.diff.gz | patch -p1

You almost always need to pass either -p0 or -p1 when applying a patch. The number is the number of path components to strip from the file names in the patch. Check the first few lines of the patch. Here, they are

diff -urN binutils-2.13.2.1.orig/ChangeLog.PS2 binutils-2.13.2.1/ChangeLog.PS2
--- binutils-2.13.2.1.orig/ChangeLog.PS2        1969-12-31 18:00:00.000000000 -0
+++ binutils-2.13.2.1/ChangeLog.PS2     2003-01-20 17:48:29.000000000 -0600

Since all paths have a leading directory, you need to pass -p1. If the first line was something like diff -urN ../binutils-2.13.2.1.orig/ChangeLog.PS2 ChangeLog.PS2 or diff -urN ChangeLog.PS2.orig ChangeLog.PS2, you would use -p0.

Once you've applied the patch, run rpmbuild -bb to build a new binary package.