Re: Question re: building RPMs

[Jeff Johnson <jbj redhat com>]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2002 at 06:17:11PM +0200, Arkadiusz Miskiewicz wrote:
> Jeff Johnson <jbj@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 06:06:55PM -0400, John Aldrich wrote:
> > > Up until the latest version of RPM, you used to be able to specify the arch 
> > > you wanted to rebuild an SRPM for. Now, when you try to specify a 
> > > "--target=<arch>" RPM will bomb with a "--target=i686: unknown option" error. 
> > > What happened to this option? Did it get changed? 
> > > Sorry if this is a FAQ, I'm not seeing it in the helpfile... as a matter of 
> > > fact, the man page still shows that as a valid command-line option when 
> > > building rpms....
> > 
> > Use rpmbuild, not rpm. The man page tells you how to configure the
> > traditional behavior if desired.
> Jeff, please try this using your rpm:
> rpm -bb i386 --target somespec.file?
> 
> This could be bug in PLD rpm 4.0.4. My rpm builds by default for
> athlon (athlon.rpm) but:
> 
> [misiek@arm SPECS]$ rpm -bb --target=i686 usbutils.spec 
> --target=i686: unknown option
> [misiek@arm SPECS]$ rpm -bb i386 --target usbutils.spec 
> Building target platforms: i386
> Building for target i386
> Executing(%prep): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.70618
> Patch #0 (usbutils-no_external_getopt.patch):
> Patch #1 (usbutils-hwdata_in_misc.patch):
> [...]

Yup, this is one of the reasons for *not* continuing to attempt
legacy compatibility for "rpm -ba" et al through popt aliases.
Aliases are almost, but not exactly, like options.

What's even more confusing is that in rpm-3.0.x there was a bug that
did exactly the opposite, i.e. "--target=foo" worked as expected,
but "--target foo" did not.

The other reason for splitting rpmbuild from rpm is that users are confused
if they type "rpm -ba ..." and have not the rpm-build package installed.
The ENOENT message displayed is perfect, but obscure and misleading.

I don't believe that an executable should know anything about
what popt aliases happen to be configured.

73 de Jeff

-- 
Jeff Johnson	ARS N3NPQ
jbj@redhat.com (jbj@jbj.org)
Chapel Hill, NC