CentOS - Oct 2019 - Can't rebuild coreutils package under CentOS 8: Missing build dependencies

--On Friday, October 25, 2019 6:39 PM -0700 Kenneth Porter 
<shiva at sewingwitch.com> wrote:
> I may have to pull the coreutils-8.30-6.el8.x86_64 sources to see how ls
> makes these decisions.
I pulled the coreutils SRPM and it won't build because it wants texinfo and 
dnf says it doesn't exist, using either the builddep or search subcommands. 
(There may be other builddep issues but texinfo is notable for being in the 
vault's SRPMs but not on the mirrors.)

I think the problem likes in the strmode API used in ls.c and it seems like 
that comes from libbsd, but I can't be sure until I get a workable build 
tree so the coreutils SRPM will install.

BTW, another data point: I chmod'd a file to 0000 and now all I get is
"-."
for the mode string. It completely chops everything but the file type and 
the ACL indicator. OTOH, if I set it to 0660, I get the full string. It 
doesn't truncate the last octet.

[ken at rocinante src]$ chmod 0000 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ ls -l yes.c
-. 1 ken ken 3895 May 13  2018 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ chmod 0006 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ ls -al yes.c
-rw-. 1 ken ken 3895 May 13  2018 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ chmod 0060 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ ls -al yes.c
----rw----. 1 ken ken 3895 May 13  2018 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ chmod 0600 yes.c
[ken at rocinante src]$ ls -al yes.c
-rw-. 1 ken ken 3895 May 13  2018 yes.c

--On Friday, October 25, 2019 8:18 PM -0700 Kenneth Porter 
<shiva at sewingwitch.com> wrote:
> I pulled the coreutils SRPM and it won't build because it wants texinfo
> and dnf says it doesn't exist, using either the builddep or search
> subcommands. (There may be other builddep issues but texinfo is notable
> for being in the vault's SRPMs but not on the mirrors.)
A source package for texinfo exists here:

<http://archive.kernel.org/centos-vault/8.0.1905/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/>

I see no binary package for it here:

<https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/centos/8.0.1905/BaseOS/x86_64/os/Packages/>

I tried "dnf builddep" on the texinfo source package and it wants
help2man.
I can't find either a source or binary package for that. (I see one in the 
CentOS 7 repo.)

Another missing dependency is 'perl(Unicode::EastAsianWidth)'. dnf
can't
find a package that supplies that.

(The end goal is to figure out where ls.c is getting an implementation of 
strmode() which is doing weird things, truncating the mode string when the 
user or group field is zero.)

I figured it out. The missing dependencies are in the PowerTools repo, 
which is disabled by default. The following command worked:

dnf builddep --enablerepo=PowerTools coreutils-8.30-6.el8.src.rpm

Now to resume working on the ls bug...