Hi List,
I just started working on RPM Packaging and had few questions.
1. Where can i find good "WORKING" Examples of packages.spec
2. Is mach, or mock, really the better version of rpmbiuld ?
OK, so you want to build a binary RPM package for deployment on your
servers. You have a .spec file or .src.rpm that you got from one of the many
repositories such as
freshrpms.net or
dag.wieers.com, or that you wrote yourself.
Why not just build it using rpmbuild
?
There are several problems you may come across.
- Given a spec file, rpmbuild won't download the source tarball and/or
patches. You have to fetch those yourself into the SOURCES directory.
- rpmbuild will abort if any build-time dependencies are missing, forcing
you to stop what you're doing, and go and build and install those
packages too.
- When your package configures itself, it may auto-detect libraries which
are available on your build system, but which are not going to be available
on the target system. For example, if openldap-devel is present then
openldap may be linked into your binaries, but if the RPM doesn't declare
openldap as a dependency, then it will fail to run on the target system.
This is an insiduous problem, which I call "the curse of autoconf".
- You can only build packages for the same type of system as your build
machine (e.g. CentOS 4 binaries on a CentOS 4 build system)
If you want an example of how bad the problem is, try building the package
perl-SOAP-Lite from its
spec file. You will
quickly find yourself in dependency hell, with 16 other packages needing to
be installed or built, all in the correct order.
The solution: mach
3. Can i install "use sudo yum install <package name> , inside a SPEC file ?
4. How can do a CHROOT inside a SPEC File
5. How do i introduce versions, r=for RPMs, when there is NO version in the SCM ( we are using Mercurial )
6. Is there a working automation framework for rpmbuild ?
7. I tried using autospec , but it includes all the source files as well. I used it as:
tar tzf myapp-0.1.tar.gz | autospec -bd -c GPL -g Utilities/System -n myapp-0.1 -l '' > myapp.spec
Thanks,
-Kamal.