On 10/2/18 1:10 PM, Avi Kivity wrote:
Hi, I'm considering moving from mock to rpmbuild, since simplifications
in my build process now allow it and rpmbuild is generally faster.
A possible problem is incompatible changes in the format. If I build on
Fedora 28+, will the resulting RPM be installable on RHEL? The RPM is
self-contained and has no dependencies.
Depends on which RHEL, and all the other funny little details.
With a truly self-contained package without external dependencies it
should be possible to build packages that can be installed on RHEL 3
even, but it'll require some tweaking.
- are the file formats compatible, and will they continue to be
compatible? I know that compression algorithms have changed, but perhaps
they were backported (or happened early enough to be included in RHEL)
The fundamental file format is basically unchanged, but like you note
compression algorithms can differ. Impossible to say anything specific
about comptibility without exact versions, but even if the older version
doesn't support compressor X you can always just configure it to use
good old gzip compression.
The rpm mechanism for dealing with incompatibilities is rpmlib()
dependencies, which will prevent installation on a version that does not
support the features a particular package requires. If such a feature
gets backported, the same package will become installable.
- are there flags I can specify to tell rpmbuild to restrict itself to
an older feature set?
Not quite like that, but once you know what you're targetting you can
configure many things to compatible level. For some other features you
might need to create spec conditionals.
- is this a supported practice, or do you recommend against for
future-proofing?
Rpm goes to quite some lengths in the name of compatibility, BUT for
best results, build on the target distro. That way any incompatibilities
will be caught at build-time instead of install time, fewer hairy
details to sort out and so on.
- Panu -
_______________________________________________
Rpm-list mailing list
Rpm-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.rpm.org/mailman/listinfo/rpm-list
