On 11/14/07, Jos Vos <jos xos nl> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 03:44:18PM -0800, Dan Ciarniello wrote:
> One thing that didn't make sense at first was that the problem only
> occurred for this rpm and not others; all had the %defattr after the
> files. I eventually realized that I was building on two machines - one
> Fedora Core 4 and the other RHEL4. The rpmbuild version on FC4 is 4.4.1
> while that on RHEL4 is 4.3.3. Apparently, in 4.3.3
the %defattr only
> applies to files following the directive while in 4.4.1 it applies to all.
No, that's not the reason.
At some point the %defattr(-,root,root,-) became the default, probably
since RPM 4.4. Try to remove it, and you'll probably see that it still
works on your FC4.
Yes, in order to establish a sane default. When building as non-root,
the original default values for owner/group (the ownership of the files
being packaged) was no longer sensible.
The other problem is that %defattr has never had clear scoping across
a set of files. Consider what happens with file manfiests that are either
appended or prepended to the %files manifest. The scoping has always been
across the remainder of %files, not within scope of the manifest, and so
there were similar "changes in behavior" when automated tools started
to add a %defattr automagically (like 5 years ago?)
But for the reason you now discovered, I don't want to use this feature
in my spec files yet (maybe in 10 years or so... ;-)).
Its rather easy to implement any desired behavior. Its impossible to please everyone.