Heads up: Noarch Subpackages
Panu Matilainen
pmatilai at laiskiainen.org
Fri Feb 13 13:48:27 UTC 2009
On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, Michael DeHaan wrote:
> Florian Festi wrote:
>> Ville Skyttä wrote:
>>> Regarding policy changes, one candidate for addition would be that if a
>>> non-noarch package does noarch subpackages, it MUST BuildRequire rpm-build
>>> >= 4.6.0. Or if there's a way to wrap the "BuildArch: noarch" for
>>> subpackages in a %if $something ... %endif where $something evaluates to
>>> true only in rpmbuild versions supporting these noarch subpackages, that'd
>>> be ok too. This is because if such a package is built with an earlier
>>> rpmbuild version, the build can succeed but not only the one expected
>>> subpackage will be noarch, but so will/may be the main package and all
>>> other subpackages as well. These builds often fail because of invalid
>>> options ending up passed to ./configure or debuginfo extracted but not
>>> packaged, but there are scenarios where the build doesn't fail and chaos
>>> ensues.
>>
>> I agree that this is a problem. But I very much dislike putting
>> BuildRequires to rpm versions into spec files. If we start with that every
>> package will have them very soon. We - RPM upstream - are already working
>> on the next improvements for rpmbuild that would also lead to such
>> BuildRequires. Even worse is that they will get outdated easily and
>> unnoticed - as they are only being some last line of defence - and though
>> be useless when they are really needed.
>>
>> As another solution for this problem we (ehm, Panu) will backport a check
>> that will make noarch packages (both regular and noarch) fail to build if
>> they contain binaries (==colored files==the right thing to do even for
>> emulators, bioses, cross compilers, ...[1]). This additional check will be
>> in place before koji will be updated [2].
>
>
> I'm a bit confused by this change. In my case, cobbler embeds a copy of
> elilo because we want to be able to make an install server that runs on
> x86/x86_64/other that also can install ia64/ppc/etc. Same for syslinux, etc
> -- you may want to run an install server on ia64 that serves up x86/x86_64
> content. Thus this content is stuff we need to /serve up/ rather than
> content we need to run on that host. I /think/ that's why I'm CC'd on
> this.
>
> It would be great if those packages themselves (syslinux) could have noarch
> portions, so any package could carry them as a payload.
>
> The alternative is asking the user to find this content themselves, and right
> now it's not possible to install elilo on a x86 system with yum, which makes
> it quite confusing on them.
>
> I would prefer that, at least, there was a way to bypass this binary file
> check in the specfile for apps that have a legitimate reason to do it.
Yes, there's an override, precisely for these kind of reasons:
# Should binaries in noarch packages terminate a build?
%_binaries_in_noarch_packages_terminate_build 1
Turning that off in spec will make binaries in noarch packages a warning,
and it serves as documentation "yes we're doing something a bit special,
this is intentional" too.
- Panu -
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