Packaging guidelines: buildroot

[Paul Howarth]

On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 16:06 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Paul Howarth (paul at city-fan.org) said: 
> > > Why isn't this the default for RPM, either patched into the default
> > > RPM package, or in redhat-rpm-config?
> > 
> > If you take an SRPM with no BuildRoot: and try to build to build it as a
> > regular user on just about any system it'll fail because nobody AFAIK
> > currently ships an rpm package with a default buildroot. So even if it's
> > fixed in rpm or mock, it'll be a while before it's safe to remove
> > BuildRoot: tags if the packager wants any semblance of portability.
> 
> I see no reason why the default can't be pulled from the stock
> system RPM macros; in fact, that's the logical place for it,
> rather than per-package.

Of course it is, but that doesn't help all the legacy/other distros that
don't set the default in this way. If someone wants to rebuild a
buildroot-less SRPM on such a system, they'll need to edit the spec file
or their rpmmacros file, which in the case of end users trying to get a
package working on their system is a whole extra layer of hassle.

I'm all for setting a default buildroot in rpm but think that there
should be a substantial grace period before the BuildRoot: tags are
removed from packages en masse.

Paul.