[fedora-arm] Introduction and dumb questions

[Gordan Bobic]

On 04/12/2012 11:43, Niels de Vos wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 11:42 PM, Peter Robinson<pbrobinson at gmail.com>  wrote:
> ...
>>>   - do I need to use Koji or this more of a tool for package maintainers to
>>> build and upload packages etc?
>>
>> No, you don't need to build them with koji, it's primary role is to
>> build the official distro packages although it's possible to use it
>> for scratch builds too. The easiest way to do this locally is to do
>> "yum install fedora-packager gcc" and then run rpmdev-setuptree which
>> will setup a local rpm build env.
>>
>> There's a good overview here
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package
>
> I'd like to add that mock and mockchain are my favourite building
> tools. I don't need the development packages installed on my system,
> just have mock install a clean chroot with all the dependencies.
> Specially if you have several source RPMs that need to be build in
> order and depend on each other, mockchain makes life really easy.

Not only that, but there are a few packages that fail to build if some 
other packages are installed. I cannot remember which packages are 
affected off the top of my head, but the problem arises because the 
package's configure script detects another package as available and 
tries to build against it, which fails. If the package is not available, 
it builds fine. In such cases, the successful build relies on packages 
NOT being there unless explicitly listed as pre-requisites. Since mock 
only installs the minimum required pre-requisites, this problem doesn't 
arise when building with mock.

It is arguable that these instances are bugs masked by using a 
self-contained build system like mock but it isn't really that big a 
problem.

Gordan