[Fedora-packaging] Building a set of packages where some BuildRequire others

[Mary Ellen Foster]

I'm currently trying to create Fedora-compliant packages of the
Internet Communications Engine (Ice) -- object-oriented middleware,
see http://www.zeroc.com/ for details. They used to provide a yum
repository for Fedora, but with the new version they've stopped. I'm
now working on adapt their SRPMS to Fedora packaging standards. (If
anyone else has done / is doing this, let me know!)

I've managed to create a few packages, in the process learning a lot
more about RPM tricks and so on. One issue I'm having -- and I'm
pretty sure it's unavoidable -- is that many of the packages have
build-time requirements on other packages. For example, the tool to
translate ice interfaces into Java code is called "slice2java" and is
part of the ice-java-devel package; this tool is then needed to build
the ice-java runtime package.

What's the accepted way of building something with this type of
constraints in mock? Should I just build temporary versions of the
necessary tools as needed (e.g., let ice-java compile its own version
of "slice2java" just for use in the build process)? I'd rather not do
that, but if it's necessary I can do things that way.

Thanks for any suggestions!

MEF

-- 
Mary Ellen Foster
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mef/