rpm building affected by terminal type?

[Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir technion ac il>]

Hi

I have had the following problem for a long time. I managed to find a
workaround, but it is not convinient, and the problem bites me from time
to time.

The system is originally mandrake 6.0, upgraded manually to 7.2 and later
to 8.1 (manually=package by package)

It seems that for almost any rpm package that I try to build when the
terminal type is set to 'xterm', the build encounters some problems:

When rpm creates the "provides" list, I get the following error:

Finding  Provides: (using /usr/lib/rpm/find-provides)...
error: line 36: Dependency tokens must begin with alpha-numeric, '_' or '/':

error: Failed to find Provides:

The line is always the lat line of the spec file. I've tried many
manipulaitions on the spec files, and it does not seem to affect this
error message.

Anyway, the package gets built, but it does not provide anything, I
believe that the fac that a package building returns "0" after one of its
parts have failed, and has created a partially-broken package, is in
itself a bug.

The strange thing is that if I set the terminal type to anything other
than "xterm" or "xterm-color", the script builds fine.

I've tried vt100, rxvt, xterms and xterm-debian .

Why should rpm care about the terminal type?

I've tried using various terminals (rxvt, aterm) and various shells (tcsh,
zsh).

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:tzafrir@technion.ac.il
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir