[TriLUG] Another plea for RPM help!

[Benjamin Reed]

Tom Bryan [tbryan at python.net] wrote:
> That's what I've been doing, but from my days of working with LaTeX, I found 
> that when everyone copies the examples they have, they continue the same 
> legacy hacks forever.  More recent versions of the tool often supported a 
> much more elegant solution.  Not surprisingly, the LaTeX community has some 
> pretty good documentation available.

Yeah.  On the bright side, the people I steal from are usually the Mandrake
or RedHat packages, which are made by the people who work on RPM itself.  =)

> I started with Zope.  That was even worse because it doesn't follow the 
> standard configure-make-install.  :-P  Really, packagind something for a very 
> small audience with a special purpose is much easier than worrying about a 
> general purpose package.

Yeah.  I've been having an interesting time packaging java stuff.  My OpenNMS
RPMs are finally at a point where I like them, and that's with essentially
pre-processing the spec file, which rubs me the wrong way, but is the only way
to do what I want without 140 million --define's on the command-line.

> "The -n and -p arguments are the same as for %post scripts."
> 
> Talk about adding insult to injury.  They documented it for triggers, but not 
> in a way that give me any insight into the %post section. 

:P

> > The best reference is the maximum RPM work-in-progress.  
> 
> At ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/max-rpm/ ?
> Strange, last time I was on www.rpm.org, I thought that I was bounced to an 
> online copy of the previous release.

If that's the same as http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/ then yes.  It's missing some
of the very advanced stuff (expand, the %{!?variable:<command>} syntax), but
it's a decent reference about 70% of the time.

> I'd do it, but I don't think that I have the time at the moment.  Maybe I'll 
> just log a bug.  The man page even has errors in it.  It's like Red Hat put 
> RPM out there just to fool their competitors into adopting it.  "What a 
> strategy.  It'll take them weeks to figure out how to use RPM!  By that time, 
> we'll already be releasing a new, incompatible version.  BWA!HA!HA!HA!"

Hahaha...

> > That's a darn good question.  I suspect going that deep into things will be
> > way too much time, but I can add stuff to the slides that won't be in the
> > presentation, maybe, if you want...
> 
> No, that's okay.  I was just curious whether you were assuming any background 
> with RPM.  Covering BuildRoot would be a good idea though.  I get the 
> impression that I should be using it, but I've had nothing but trouble with 
> it.  

Eek, you're building as root?  Definitely move to a buildroot as soon as
possible; building RPMs, especially testing RPMs, while root is a very bad
thing.  Too easy to overwrite existing system files without knowing it...

Best description I've seen for setting it up is at the Mandrake RPM HOWTO:

  http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/howtos/mdk-rpm/

They tell you what you need in your .rpmmacros and stuff to build as you.

-- 
Ben Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick (ranger at befunk.com)
http://defiance.dyndns.org/ / http://radio.scenespot.org/
"Right now Moltar is heating my skull up to a scorching 450 degrees.
It's like getting a scalp massage... from Lucifer." -- Space Ghost