Re: fakeroot

[John Pye <john pye student unsw edu au>]

Hi Bob,

I guess I didn't put that very clearly. The issue I'm talking about is 
those packages that come with wierd installer scripts that are 
interactive or download files along the way, or whatever else. An 
example is the following:
http://www.smlnj.org/dist/working/110.59/index.html

Unfortunately this happens to be a prerequisite for a rather important 
piece of software that I've been wanting to build. But without 
unleashing this script on my root account, I can't proceed. With 
fakeroot, I'm thinking that I could wrap up that whole installer process 
and come out with at least a reasonable starting point for an RPM, 
without having to totally rewrite the install scripts for that big scary 
piece of software.

I've come across these types of packages more than once: you can spend a 
long time getting a non-standard installer script to the point where it 
is 'rpm friendly'. I think that perhaps if fakeroot were integrated in 
to RPM in some way, there might be a chance of saving some time in these 
situations. It seems that dpkg provides this capability, although I 
can't say I understand it in any detail.

Cheers
JP

Bob Proulx wrote:
> John Pye wrote:
>   
> > I came across a very neat approach used by the debian people when
> > building packages, and given the difficulties that can arise when
> > writing "%files" sections in RPMs,
> >     
>
> What difficulties are those?  I am drawing a blank.
>
>   
> > I thought I would ask the list: is 'fakeroot' available with the RPM
> > system, and would it be of use in building RPMs?
> >     
>
> The fakeroot program is available if you have installed it.  I do not
> believe it is a standard component of any rpm based distro however.
>
> First, never build packages as real root.  Any package that thinks it
> needs real root to build is a buggy package and should be fixed.
>
> Debian's dpkg uses the permissions stored in the tar.gz file (embedded
> in the .deb package file) to hold the ownership the file will bef
> installed as when the package is installed.  Therefore fakeroot plays
> in integral part is being able to set those owners arbitrarily while
> building the package.
>
> Red Hat's rpm contains a %attr(-,root,root) directive that overrides
> the owners stored in the embedded cpio of the .rpm file.  Therefore
> generally fakeroot is not needed with rpm.  Simply use %attr to set
> the ownership as you require them to be set.  You will still see the
> builder's ownership in the .rpm file (e.g. rpm2cpio) but at
> installation time the ownership will be set by rpm explicitly.
>
>   
> > Perhaps fakeroot's trickery can't be supported on Fedora/Redhat systems
> > for some reason. I'd like to know if/why.
> > http://fakeroot.alioth.debian.org/
> >     
>
> Works fine for me.
>
> Bob
>
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>   

--
John Pye
Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
http://pye.dyndns.org/