Packaging guidelines: buildroot

[Panu Matilainen]

On Wed, 17 May 2006, Bill Nottingham wrote:

> Axel Thimm (Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net) said:
>> Makes sense, it will make an end to the fantasy of BuildRoot name
>> inventes (like adding the uid ...).
>>
>> But what happens when a package has no BuildRoot and neither does a
>> macro for it exist? Would it potentially eat the user's home?
>
> rpmbuild: Fatal, no build root defined
>
> (I doubt it does this now...)

IIRC it currently just tries to use / as buildroot if not defined 
anywhere, which is utterly nonsensible.

It'd make perfect sense if it behaved like that: if no buildroot has been 
set in spec or macros, error out, and then specify a sane buildroot in the 
default macros. I requested this on rpm-list a few years ago but got shot 
down with "yes I agree but legacy <mumble jumble>"s.

So yes, pretty please, my +10 for this. The current situation of people 
doing the right thing and using non / buildroot having to put in extra 
cruft in their specs is just silly.

 	- Panu -