First, Ubuntu and Debian dropped libmozjs185 as a supported package.
Then, RedHat/Fedora/CentOS broke our shipped, working package by redefining a header in a patch release incompatibly, forcing a rebuild.
So, we're just building and shipping our own couch-libmozjs185 / couch-js packages now.
While we‘re at it, we’re going to make sure both platforms have both sets of patches, so behaviour is consistent across Linux distributions. We're also going to be sure that we use the configure options that we know work (specifically, we add --disable-methodjit as we have found this increases runtime stability.)
The hope is that all of this goes away and is replaced by ChakraCore.
To keep things simpler to maintain, the exact same set of patches is used in building rpms and debs. (Symlinks aren‘t used, but could be. The contents of js/rpm/SOURCES and js/debian/patches are identical except for Debian’s series file.) In general, the deb patches are of a higher quality, most of them originating from upstream.
With that in mind, the rpm patches as of js-1.8.5-20 (c7) were reviewed and handled thusly:
On rpm systems, use yum localinstall path/to/file.rpm path/to/next.rpm to install local rpm files.
On deb systems, use apt install path/to/file.deb path/to/next.deb to install local deb files.