create rpm packages on a debian machine

3 March 2010 - 7:59pm — abate

This gave me a bit of an headache ... Why on earth rpmbuild does not simply respect environment variables nor have a command line option to specify the TEMPDIR used to build the package or simply look for a simple configuration file in the local directory ? From command line you can only specify --buildroot . For everything else you must specify a global file called .rpmmacros (not .rpmrc !) and write the new defaults there. This must be either in your home, or in /etc (other other rpm specific paths). Anyway ... enough for this rant. This is the hack to create a local build environment :

#!/bin/bash

RPMBUILD=`pwd`/rpmbuild

RPMMACROS="$HOME/.rpmmacros"

if [ -f $RPMMACROS ] ; then

  cp $RPMMACROS $RPMMACROS~

fi

echo "%_topdir  $RPMBUILD" > $RPMMACROS

echo "%_tmppath $RPMBUILD/tmp" >> $RPMMACROS

echo "%_rpmdir `pwd`/RPMS" >> $RPMMACROS

echo "%mkrel(c:) %(echo mdv20010)" >> $RPMMACROS

mkdir -p rpmbuild/{SRPMS,BUILD,RPMS,SPECS,tmp}

The mkrel part is something else that is needed if you want to build a package that resemble a mandriva package ... The rpm package in debian does not include this macro by default.

I'm using the rpmbuild part of the rpm package on debian sid (RPM version 4.7.2).

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11 April 2011 - 8:56am — Ap.Muthu (not verified)

Fixes to the code: echo

Fixes to the code:

 echo "%_rpmdir `pwd`/RPMS" >> $RPMMACROS

should be

 echo "%_rpmdir $RPMBUILD/RPMS" >> $RPMMACROS

SRPM gets built with only the spec file and no files from the BUILDROOT

RPM gets built correctly

Sometimes we get an error like:

 error: Couldn't exec /usr/lib/rpm/fontconfig.prov: No such file or directory
 Requires(rpmlib): rpmlib(CompressedFileNames) <= 3.0.4-1 rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix) <= 4.0-1

Yet the rpm gets compiled correctly.

Everytime we get: unknown, 0: Warning: using regular magic file `/etc/magic'.

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