[Mageia-dev] A question about BuildRequires and other RPM questions.

Robert Wood robert.wood at apostrophe.co.uk
Fri Mar 8 12:18:03 CET 2013


Even as a programmer/electronics engineer (admittedly down at an 
embedded level most of the time) some of this is going so far over my 
head, it's a vapour trail in the sky.

There are far too many acronyms of stuff I've not come across, for me to 
even get the vaguest grasp of what's been talked about.

I'm not sure what the answer is really, I thought maybe a you tube 
tutorial might be a good idea, but even then, how do you know what level 
to talk down to.

No idea, for example. what iurt, mock are or do; how to make a minimal 
install and keep making the system go back to minimal install when 
creating the next RPM; what a btrfs subvolume is and other things.

I still don't get this whole trial and error thing. It seems that you 
might submit something to the repositories that someone finds doesn't 
install because of a missing dependency and you redo it. Then you can 
retry that for up to five goes before it finally works? That seems 
crazy. I must have misunderstood.

I have no problem learning stuff, I do it every single day in my work 
and it's what makes it so enjoyable, but maybe I need to take smaller 
steps first? No idea where to start or how to go about doing that 
though. As I might not have any work in a week's time it would 
potentially be an ideal time to learn, but maybe I'm just not the right 
person to do this?



On 28/02/13 21:18, Dan Fandrich wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 03:25:41PM +0100, Guillaume Rousse wrote:
>> Build dependencies are usually specified in installation
>> instructions. For humans, of course. You may also try to parse the
>> outpout of ./configure (or equivalent) script. In both case, there is
>> not garanty then every build dependency will get specified.
>
> The other way is to work backwards by looking at the install dependencies
> that rpmbuild discovered, or the NEEDED lines from objdump -x, and adding the
> -devel versions of those libraries. That won't catch any compile-time-only
> dependencies, though (like libtool, autoconf or flex) but it will give you
> something to start from.  Note also that some programs will automatically
> discover what optional libraries are available at build time and configure
> themselves accordingly. So, if you miss some BuildRequires, you might end up
> with a binary that works but is missing features.
>
>>>> Dan
>


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