Off-root building of RPMs

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

Hi all,

I'm new to this list although I've been building RPMs for a little while
now. I have finally decided it's time to build my RPMs as a user other
than root -- to try to work out the problems that I previously had with
that.

The first problem is that according to 'Maximum RPM' I should be able to
add a ~/.rpmrc file containing just "topdir:/home/buildbot/rpmbuild",
and, so long as I have created the required directories (mkdir
~/rpmbuild && cd ~/rpmbuild && mkdir SPECS SOURCES RPMS SRPMS BUILD),
then I should be able to just run 'rpmbuild' and it should all work. It
doesn't: I get a complaint about the 'topdir' line in my .rpmrc being
invalid. This is on FC5 with rpm-4.4.2-15.2.

I found that the only way to build RPMs off-root was to use the
suggested .rpmmacros to replace %_topdir with something else. There was
a nice little download script on the RPM webpage that looked after all
that. But it seems that the manual needs to be updated to explain if/why
the .rpmrc approach isn't working, and whether or not that's a
Fedora-only issue, or what.

Next, my off-root RPM build fails due to 'install -o root -g root'
commands. What is the suggested why to have RPMs built for correct root
installation if you're not able to use the 'install -o' command during
the build? Is that where the %defattr stuff comes into play? Should I
not use 'install -o' in RPMs?

Finally, my trickiest problem. I have an RPM spec file as shown below
that results in a dependency on '/usr/bin/perl5'. I don't have this on
my system, so I want to trace back where the dependency is coming from.
I suspect that the 'update-mime-database' command in my %pre and %post
could be responsible -- how can I check that?

Any suggestions on this much appreciated.

Cheers
John Pye

https://pse.cheme.cmu.edu/svn-view/ascend/code/trunk/ascend.spec?rev=633&view=markup

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