[Fedora-packaging] Phase out buildroot?

[Panu Matilainen]

On Thu, 21 May 2009, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> On 05/20/2009 11:39 PM, Chuck Anderson wrote:
>> On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 11:05:57PM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>>> On 05/20/2009 08:47 PM, Chuck Anderson wrote:
>>>> On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 05:46:18PM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>>>>> Since the rpm version shipped in Fedora 10 and beyond defines a default
>>>>> buildroot, I think we can start phasing out the current buildroot
>>>>> Guideline.  How about adding this to the start of the buildroot tag
>>>>> section?
>>>> I'd be concerned about accidentally blowing away people's systems if
>>>> they take a src.rpm from Fedora and try to build it on an older Fedora
>>>> or non-Fedora system.
>>>> 
>>>> %install
>>>> rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
>>>> ...
>>>> 
>>>> %clean
>>>> rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
>>>> 
>>> What will this evaluate to on older systems?  Won't it be "rm -rf\n"?
>>> Which actually won't remove anything?
>> 
>> Last I knew, it will evaluate to / and all hilarity will ensue.  Once
>> upon a time, the recommendation was to use something like this to
>> prevent such disasters:
>> 
>> [ "$RPM_BUILD_ROOT" != "/" ]&&  rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
>> 
>> That fell out of favor when the BuildRoot: tag was mandated in Fedora
>> packages.  If we remove the BuildRoot: requirement and instead rely
>> upon the new rpmbuild default, we risk obliterating unsuspecting
>> users' systems.
>> 
>> I have a better idea.  How about we get rpmbuild to automatically do
>> the moral equivalent of "[ "$RPM_BUILD_ROOT" != "/" ]&&  rm -rf
>> $RPM_BUILD_ROOT" internally before starting %install and %clean, and
>> remove all such boilerplate from all Fedora specs.  Then we can remove
>> the BuildRoot: requirement as well, and older/non-Fedora systems will
>> just break/pollute/fail to cleanup the build instead of blowing away
>> the users system, a much lesser evil IMO.
>> 
> I thought that Panu posted something about this actually being the case but I 
> can't find it in a quick look at the code in git.  Perhaps that was an idea 
> rather than actually coded or perhaps my memory is wrong.

Lots of ideas get tossed around, many of them get get forgotten before 
anybody gets around to do anything about them... :-/

> Panu care to weigh in on this ?

There are no changes to rpm in this area that I recall. This could be done 
by just tweaking the build templates in redhat-rpm-config though, 
something like this in /usr/lib/rpm/redhat/macros:

%__spec_install_pre %{___build_pre}\
[ "$RPM_BUILD_ROOT" != "/" ] && rm -rf "${RPM_BUILD_ROOT}"\
%{nil}

This would also force fixing any packages that install stuff from %build.
I remember openoffice being that way... hmm ok that was a long time ago, 
it's been fixed in F-9.

Another possible alternative is what Suse does: remove and create the 
buildroot at beginning of the entire build (copy-pasted from suse macros):

%__spec_build_pre %{___build_pre}\
%{?buildroot:  %__rm -rf "$RPM_BUILD_ROOT"\
%__mkdir_p `dirname "$RPM_BUILD_ROOT"`\
%__mkdir "$RPM_BUILD_ROOT"\
}

 	- Panu -