mock rpmdb version issue with epel-5-i386 target

[Mike McLean]

On 09/14/2009 02:09 PM, Alan Franzoni wrote:
>> There is no back conversion. I'm not sure how this should affect any
>> deployment process for the resulting builds. The rpmdb in the chroot should
>> generally not be accessed by the build itself. Any such activity in a spec
>> file is unwise and questionable.
>
> Sure it is, and such activity is not performed inside any of any SPEC.

Sorry, was just guessing. I have seen folks try to read the rpmdb at 
build time before.

> One of my targets is to build SRPMs inside an epel-5-i386 chroot; this
> can be done pretty easily with mock, but what if I have a dependency
> on an RPM which is not available in a yum repo? I'd like to test some
> internally built rpms in a pseudo-production environment *before*
> they're sent to our repo. So I just wanted to use "--copyin", then use
> --shell to manually invoke rpm and manually install such packages.
> Also, sometimes some packages have build dependencies that can't be
> satisfied by repos and should be installed manually (again, dependency
> on a test package).

You could just use the rpm command line with --root to install from 
outside the chroot. If you want to make sure all the mounts that mock 
creates are in place, the easiest way is to use mock --shell in one 
window, leave that idle, and run the rpm --root (or perhaps yum 
--installroot $d localinstall $f) command in another window (outside the 
chroot). Hackish, but, functional.

I suppose we should add a way to access the yum localinstall 
functionality through mock.

> If it's the quickest path I'll just setup an internal, testing only,
> can-be-trashed-at-any-time repository, possibly on the vary same
> machine hosting mock.

That may be easier if you do this often. I'm sure you're aware, but just 
for completeness note that you can include more than one repo in the 
mock config, allowing this testing repo to be a small add-on (and hence 
a very quick run of createrepo).