[Gambas-user] Packaging - rpmbuild

[Bruce Bruen]

Me again! :-)

Houston , we have a problem!

I'm not too sure how to characterise this but, I'll start along these
lines:

1) I'm fairly sure that rpmbuild (and friends) depends on some pretty
stable autotools stuff in the source archive.  For this reason I have
been harping on about getting the autotools packager right.    

2) Nasty and only diagnosed tonight !-(  rpmbuild looks in the
packager's home dir for a couple of nicely hidden and cryptic files
called ".rpmrc" and ".rpmmacros".

  .rpmrc appears to contain the i-whatever architecture translates, viz:
    buildarchtranslate: i386: i586
    buildarchtranslate: i486: i586
    buildarchtranslate: i586: i586
    buildarchtranslate: i686: i586

  .rpmmacros on the other hand has some stuff that are important, viz
    %_topdir	/home/bb/src/rpm
    %_tmppath	/home/bb/src/tmp
    %packager	paddys-hill
    %distribution phhorse
    %distsuffix	ph12
    %vendor	Paddys-Hill_dot_Net

3) I'm pretty sure that we are using a generic and reasonably stable
version of rpmbuild:
  [bb at ...2711... ~]$ rpmbuild --version
  RPM version 4.8.1

<aside>I am aware that there are (ahem) later versions available, but
not on sourceforge. (Ahem! and the changelog IMHO looks a little like a
mad cow on steroids who has lost her Valium prescription.)</aside>

4) We build rpm packages for our clients outside gambas.  Which work.
So I'm not too amendable to the idea of mucking around with these files
to suit the gambas packager.

5) The problem, as far as I am able to see with my limited knowledge of
rpm builds, is the (_topdir) and (_tmppath) macros. These tend to
override the places that the gambas rpm builder scripts are looking for
"stuff", in particular the source archive.

If you are still reading by now, God bless you.  I've been trying to
track this down for 12 hours straight.  

E'en more. I really would appreciate it, if you do know a heck of a lot
about rpmbuild, that you let me know so we can fix this and add it back
to gambas.

Bruce