[CentOS] noob question about mock

Sun Jan 2 04:00:01 UTC 2011
Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 9:45 AM, Leonard den Ottolander
<leonard at den.ottolander.nl> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, 2010-12-30 at 13:51 +0000, nux at li.nux.ro wrote:
>> As far as I could read about it, mock
>> essentially rebuilds srpms so to use it I would need a separate "classical"
>> build environment to create those srpms in the first place.
>> Am I right or did I get something terribly wrong?
>
> Since CentOS is an rpm based system you will almost always be rebuilding
> from srpms and *not* from plain tar balls. Repos catering for
> RHEL/CentOS/Fedora provide srpms by default.
>
> However, if you want to make your own (s)rpms or patch existing ones you
> will indeed need a "classical" build environment to do so. And since
> there are a couple of packages that mock will not build you will need a
> fallback build environment for such cases.
>
> Regards,
> Leonard.

You can do it inside the mock chroot cage. I do, on occasion. The
difficult is that I find myself wanting things like emacs to edit code
and patches, RCS to manage versions of my new .spec files, and
unpredictable dependencies as I wrote the code.

If necessary, I use one text window (with Alt-F2) to run "mock
--shell" and get that working shell window, and another window (with
Alt-F3) to drop other RPM's into /var/lib/mock/[whatever]/root/tmp/
and be able to install them in the other windows. But I'm a complete
weasel.

I also use the 'mock' from 'epel-testing', which has some very useful
features not in the version of mock from CentOS 5.