[lsb-discuss] RPM build tool

Stew Benedict stewb at linux-foundation.org
Tue Aug 12 03:57:00 PDT 2008


On Mon, 11 Aug 2008, Alexey Khoroshilov wrote:

> We have pass through several bug-fix iterations with Stew and the 
> lsb-makelsbpkg-0.5-1.noarch.rpm works well for us.
> 
> At the same time I believe the best proof of the concept will be if we 
> switch build process of all applicable lsb deliverables to the makelsbpkg.
> 

While I agree in principle (more eating our own dogfood), it's going to 
take a pretty significant engineering effort to retool all our builds to 
use makelsbpkg rather than rpm itself. The tool isn't really designed to 
replace rpm, but to make an easy way to package for folks that tell us 
creating a spec file is too hard.

One big shortcoming with the tool is how to create the files on disk with 
the desired file mode and ownership as non-root. I'm presuming people that 
are currently shipping tarballs (which is the type of audience the tool is 
targeting) solve this problem somehow (sudo make DESTDIR=foo install?). 
The tool then inherits the file mode of the files under pkgroot.

Rpm handles this bit for you in the %files stanza, and core-test in 
particicular has a fairly detailed list of files with special ownership.
While I could probably extend the fairly simple xml descriptor file to 
handle the file perms too, converting them as the cpio archive is created, 
you're going to end up with an xml file that to me is going to be harder 
to create and maintain than if one had just created a spec file in the 
first place and used rpmbuild.


-- 
Stew Benedict
The Linux Foundation



More information about the lsb-discuss mailing list