[Rpm-maint] Version of Tar used with RPM

[Hugh Caley]

On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 16:37 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Sep 2007, Hugh Caley wrote:
> 
> > I hope this is the right forum for this.  There were only two forums
> > listed at rpm.org.
> >
> > I need to get RPM on AIX to use GNU tar, and I can't figure out how to
> > do it. I'm setting the %__tar macro to /opt/freeware/bin/tar in
> > my .rpmmacros file, but the %setup phase of the RPM build still insists
> > on using "tar" (which means it uses the first tar it finds in the PATH,
> > which is /usr/bin/tar).
> >
> > As  you can see from the output below, it is respecting my definition of
> > the location of gzip, but not tar:
> >
> >
> >> + tar -xf -
> >> + /opt/freeware/bin/gzip -dc /home/hughc/redhat/SOURCES/SecurityServer-1.1A.tgz
> >
> > I can't just put /opt/freeware/bin first in my path; we have GCC and the
> > various GNU build utilities installed, and it breaks XLC.
> >
> > Anyone know how to do this?
> >
> > RPM version is rpm-3.0.5-30; since this is the only version that IBM
> > provides, I'm probably not going to be able to upgrade it, but if that
> > would be the only solution ...
> 
> tar seems to be hardcoded to "tar" in even rpm 4.4.x, it's probably that 
> way in 3.x too. Try aliasing tar to /opt/freeware/bin/tar to limit the 
> impact?
> 
>  	- Panu -
> 

Thank you.  It does seem to be hardcoded in RPM v4 as well. On RHEL 4,
RPM version rpm-4.3.3-18_nonptl, I had the following two lines
in .rpmmacros:

%__tar               /home/hughc/bin/tar
%__gzip              /home/hughc/bin/gzip

and as you can see from the output below it respected my gzip path but
still used the default path for tar:

+ /home/hughc/bin/gzip
-dc /home/hughc/redhat/SOURCES/SecurityServer-1.1A.tgz
+ tar -xf -  

I can probably use an alias, or a symlink, to work around this.  I
really shouldn't have to though, should I?  Wouldn't this qualify as a
bug?

Hugh


-- 
Hugh Caley, Linux Administrator
Aldon Computer Group
6001 Shellmound St. Suite 600
Emeryville, CA 94608

(510) 285-8542 | hughc at aldon.com