[Rpm-ecosystem] What is the recommended procedure for building Fedora packages on EL7?

[Jeff Johnson]

> On Jul 3, 2018, at 4:24 AM, Miroslav Suchý <msuchy at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> Dne 3.7.2018 v 03:18 Jeff Johnson napsal(a):
>> I would be very surprised if a backport to EL7 was permitted.
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1508538
> It is already in RHEL 7.6.

Good! There's a plan that exists!

> However, as I stated, it is just for *reading* the tags. It does not mean any change to rpmbuild.
> 

Not so good: does the plan permit upgrades/backport S to "critical components" of RHEL like yum/rpm, or is the plan limited to RHEL add-ons like dnf?

No change to rpmbuild (or yum), while the dnf add-on to RHEL can parse rich dependencies, is surely going to be very confusing to many people trying their own upgrades to later software by attempting to build Fedora or RawHide *.src.rpm packages.

>> Meanwhile this isn't the 1st time that Fedora could not be built with mock on EL7.
> 
> And it will stay this way. No rich deps in EL7. No way to build rich deps enabled package for EL7 on EL7.
> 

Ok, so certain programs, like dnf, and perhaps mock, are permitted to *read* rich dependencies, but other programs like yum/rpm are not permitted, in order to enforce the business policy of "No rich dependencies" in EL7.

Surely the problems with that plan can be foreseen.

>> suggesting a version of rpm to install on EL7 in order to build Fedora packages with mock.
> 
> I did not suggest to install different version on EL7. I just want to print a message that they need some version of rpm
> (or some capability). I will leave it up to them to realize that this version is not available for EL7.
> 

You might consider suggesting where an implementation for rich dependencies might be found, like OoenSUSE. Just kidding ;-)

> I assume that it can be very confusing for people. They were able to build F28 package on EL7. But suddenly they get
> error. When they start to debugging, they will find that it happens just for some packages. The error comes from mock so
> it must be mock error for sure. And it is not.
> I would love to print some user friendly error message, but on mock level, I cannot distinguish this error from other
> dnf/yum errors.
> 

No matter what, the (first) error message you are trying to replace has been located in depsolvers like yum/dnf, not rpm, and should be addressed as a bug/RFE for those depsolvers.

You might also try adding comments to rhbz#1508538.

hth

73 de Jeff
> Miroslav
> _______________________________________________
> Rpm-ecosystem mailing list
> Rpm-ecosystem at lists.rpm.org
> http://lists.rpm.org/mailman/listinfo/rpm-ecosystem