Hi Bob,
I guess I didn't put that very clearly. The issue I'm talking about is
those packages that come with wierd installer scripts that are
interactive or download files along the way, or whatever else. An
example is the following:
http://www.smlnj.org/dist/working/110.59/index.html
Unfortunately this happens to be a prerequisite for a rather important
piece of software that I've been wanting to build. But without
unleashing this script on my root account, I can't proceed. With
fakeroot, I'm thinking that I could wrap up that whole installer process
and come out with at least a reasonable starting point for an RPM,
without having to totally rewrite the install scripts for that big scary
piece of software.
I've come across these types of packages more than once: you can spend a
long time getting a non-standard installer script to the point where it
is 'rpm friendly'. I think that perhaps if fakeroot were integrated in
to RPM in some way, there might be a chance of saving some time in these
situations. It seems that dpkg provides this capability, although I
can't say I understand it in any detail.
Cheers
JP
Bob Proulx wrote:
John Pye wrote:
I came across a very neat approach used by the debian people when
building packages, and given the difficulties that can arise when
writing "%files" sections in RPMs,
What difficulties are those? I am drawing a blank.
I thought I would ask the list: is 'fakeroot' available with the RPM
system, and would it be of use in building RPMs?
The fakeroot program is available if you have installed it. I do not
believe it is a standard component of any rpm based distro however.
First, never build packages as real root. Any package that thinks it
needs real root to build is a buggy package and should be fixed.
Debian's dpkg uses the permissions stored in the tar.gz file (embedded
in the .deb package file) to hold the ownership the file will bef
installed as when the package is installed. Therefore fakeroot plays
in integral part is being able to set those owners arbitrarily while
building the package.
Red Hat's rpm contains a %attr(-,root,root) directive that overrides
the owners stored in the embedded cpio of the .rpm file. Therefore
generally fakeroot is not needed with rpm. Simply use %attr to set
the ownership as you require them to be set. You will still see the
builder's ownership in the .rpm file (e.g. rpm2cpio) but at
installation time the ownership will be set by rpm explicitly.
Perhaps fakeroot's trickery can't be supported on Fedora/Redhat systems
for some reason. I'd like to know if/why.
http://fakeroot.alioth.debian.org/
Works fine for me.
Bob
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--
John Pye
Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
http://pye.dyndns.org/
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