building rpm packages for older distributions.

[R P Herrold]

On Mon, 2 Jan 2012, Elias Abacioglu wrote:

> So the question is, is there a way to build packages with "legacy" support?
> Like some way to force the rpm to use other payload and filedigest methods
> that have wider support.
>
> Cause it feels kind of backwards to install centos 4 to build rpm packages
> that should work on old and new versions of rpm.

I dunno about 'feels backward' -- later versions of RHEL, and 
thus CentOS have moved to new forms of compression, etc, whose 
'emergence as desired' were not knowable to earlier versions 
of RPM

The steps of 'ripping out xz compression' and later RPM 
'enhancements' is fairly mechanical', less so is addressing 
the addition of certain dependency finding and other 
'convenience' macros used in later RPM versions

That said, a 'general' path to building packages that do not 
require invasive changes [1], is to build with the older 
tools, tweaking the .spec file, as needed

-- Russ herrold

[1] as a genearl rule, for compatability, one wants to leave 
untouched glibc, rpm, python, and yum