[CentOS-devel] still trying to build upstream srpms

Jeff Johnson n3npq at mac.com
Mon Sep 1 15:52:36 UTC 2008


On Sep 1, 2008, at 11:17 AM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:

> On Aug 31, 2008, at 8:15 PM, Joe Pruett wrote:
>> second, even though karanbir will be trying to build the rpms i am  
>> interested in, so far no one has actually answered how we know  
>> what rpmbuild command line to give.  there are lots of --define  
>> possibilities and i don't see that info available from a binary  
>> rpm.  so how do we know how to build a package?
>
> What's implied when people say mock is being used, is that there  
> are no special '--define', etc. flags passed to rpmbuild from  
> within mock.
>

Hmmm, and why is passing --define (or not) relevant to anything in  
the real world?

Yes, the CentOS issue is trying to identify a "reproducible build",  
as defined by the
RHEL build system, and rpm macros are often different and  
continuously changing.

If the macros used were the only part of the "reproducible build"  
problem,
then --macrosused (and the RPMTAG_BUILDMACROS header extension)
solves the problem by spewing the list of all macros used
by rpmbuild (or any other rpm command) at termination,
and/or by including the equivalent list of used macros (and  
definitions) within a *.src.rpm
header.

But the real problem is that all build systems contain versions of  
compilers and toolchains
that are different. That's a whole different class of problem.

So not passing --define is hardly relevant imho, the tool chains used  
for building
are what is very tricky to identify and attempt to "reproduce".

73 de Jeff



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