On 03/19/2012 02:32 PM, Nikos Roussos wrote:

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 2:09 PM, Alec Leamas <leamas.alec@gmail.com> wrote:

On 03/19/2012 12:50 PM, Nikos Roussos wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to build a package. It's an update on SparkleShare package. I build it locally with mock and everything seems ok. Package is built successfully. But when I try to build it on koji I get an error and build fails on both f16 f17 targets:
"The databases in [/usr/share/applications] could not be updated."
which I think has something to do with the desktop-file-validate on %install phase

See the relevant koji task and build log for more:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3908835

Any help appreciated

--
Nikos Roussos

From the log, it looks  like it fails in 'install-data-hook'. If so, the culprit might be some Makefile.am. Have upstream updated a Makefile.am to include 'desktop-file-install', failing when not making a "real" install int /usr?

If this is right, you should be able to verify that the %install hasn't really begun when the error is triggered. If unsure, put some simple 'echo' statement in top of %install to verify that it hasn't been started.

If this doesn't help, scanning the generated Makefiles for 'desktop-file-install' and/or  '/usr/share/applications' might give  a clue

Actually there is an:

install-data-hook:
        update-desktop-database $(datadir)/applications

which seems to be the exact point that installation fails

You must patch that, it will try to update /usr/share/applications when building the rpm which of course isn't acceptable.

For Fedora, you could just remove the target and run automake; autoconf; ./configure, given that you run update-desktop-database as part of %install.

However, this should really be resolved together with upstream. If they want to keep the functionality, one could possibly:

- Move it from install-data-hook to a separate target such as 'install-desktop' and let users run this as part of installation into system dirs.
- Only run update-desktop-database if $(datadir)/applications is writeable:
   
Personally, I would prefer the first one. To  mess with /usr/share/applications when DESTDIR is set is not really the way 'make install' is supposed to work. And updating $(DESTDIR)/$(datadir)/applications  just doesn't make sense.

But I'm just a newbie, maybe someone else has a better piece of advice here?