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create rpm packages on a debian machine

Wed, 03/03/2010 - 19:59 — abate

This gave me a bit of an headache ... Why on earth rpmbuild does not simply respect environment variables nor have a command line option to specify the TEMPDIR used to build the package or simply look for a simple configuration file in the local directory ? From command line you can only specify --buildroot . For everything else you must specify a global file called .rpmmacros (not .rpmrc !) and write the new defaults there. This must be either in your home, or in /etc (other other rpm specific paths). Anyway ... enough for this rant. This is the hack to create a local build environment :

#!/bin/bash

RPMBUILD=`pwd`/rpmbuild
RPMMACROS="$HOME/.rpmmacros"

if [ -f $RPMMACROS ] ; then
  cp $RPMMACROS $RPMMACROS~
fi

echo "%_topdir  $RPMBUILD" > $RPMMACROS
echo "%_tmppath $RPMBUILD/tmp" >> $RPMMACROS
echo "%_rpmdir `pwd`/RPMS" >> $RPMMACROS
echo "%mkrel(c:) %(echo mdv20010)" >> $RPMMACROS

mkdir -p rpmbuild/{SRPMS,BUILD,RPMS,SPECS,tmp}

The mkrel part is something else that is needed if you want to build a package that resemble a mandriva package ... The rpm package in debian does not include this macro by default.

I'm using the rpmbuild part of the rpm package on debian sid (RPM version 4.7.2).