How to implement and check a rpm for an 'rpmlib' capability

Mon Mar 2 11:02:43 UTC 2015

Hi there

I have a post in relation with a - much older - thread - back in Feb. 2013; I’m using the same Subject: just in case 

** the background

We have a build setup, where we build fedora instances as guests in a fedora host (guests are lxc containers, but that does not matter for the issue)

In the process of bootstrapping the guest, we invoke the host rpm/yum binaries to create a first viable image, that can then be chroot’ed into for further populating the guest image

** the older thread

2 years ago, I filed an issue we had when trying to build a f18 guest inside a f14 host

the issue was that the host(f14) rpm did not expose the special 'X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir’ capability that the filesystem rpm from f18 depends on

** the new issue

meanwhile we have moved the host to f18 and then f20, and the issue had of course vanished

except that now that I have a host based on fedora21, the issue is back; as much as the fedora14 rpm binary did *not yet* expose this capability, it seems that the fedora21 rpm binary does not expose it *any longer*

is this a fair way to describe the situation ?
if yes, would it be possible to have the mainstream rpm expose this capability again ?
otherwise what would be the recommended way to work around this problem ?

thanks in advance for any insight on this — Thierry

> On 02 Feb 2013, at 13:16, Thierry Parmentelat <thierry.parmentelat at inria.fr> wrote:
> 
> Many thanks for the feedback
> 
> I've actually found my way out by essentally rebuilding f18's rpm more or less as is (just turning off selinux for unresolved symbols) 
> 
> Which is something that I had tried at the time when I wrote this, but as a matter of fact my real problem was, due to some obscure hacks that I was not aware of, rpm was indeed invoked on an image where a /sbin/ was present, 
> And so the code that runs before actually providing 'rpmlib(X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir)' was silently exiting, hence my symptoms below
> Having removed these dirty patches now works like a charm
> 
> Thanks again for the feedback, and sorry for not reporting that earlier but I was starting to think I wouldn't get anything by this channel :-)
> 
> Talking of which, I have another- completely unrelated -  trouble with this scenario, so I'll describe it in another post
> 
> -- Thierry
> 
> On Feb 2, 2013, at 12:14 PM, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> 
>> On 01/29/2013 04:04 PM, Thierry Parmentelat wrote:
>>> Hi
>>> 
>>> I'm facing issues with rpm in a rather convoluted scenario, where a fedora14 physical box spins off virtual machines, and in the mix invokes rpm/yum to build guest images
>>> 
>>> Long story short, for guests under fedora 17 and 18, I run into this
>>> ERROR You need to update rpm to handle:
>>> rpmlib(X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir) is needed by filesystem-3.1-2.fc18.x86_64
>>> rpmlib(X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir) is needed by setup-2.8.57-1.fc18.noarch
>>> 
>>> As far as I understand fedora has added this as a precaution for upgrades across the f16/f17 barrier and I really do not plan on doing any of this, so using an rpm binary/package that fakes this 'X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir' thing would be enough for my needs at first sight
>>> 
>>> Trying to work around that, I made an attempt to rebuild f18's rpm under f14; which was easy enough; at first sight it seemed to have the proper f18 patch so I was optimistic :)
>>> 
>>> -----
>>> Unfortunately using this new rpm did not solve the issue, and when trying to check that the new rpm indeed had the required capability - or whatever the proper name is here, I mean 'X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir' - I realized that even with the native f18 rpm I was not able to spot that feature:
>>> 
>>> # rpm -qp rpm-4.10.2-1.fc18.x86_64.rpm --provides
>>> warning: rpm-4.10.2-1.fc18.x86_64.rpm: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 Signature, key ID de7f38bd: NOKEY
>>> config(rpm) = 4.10.2-1.fc18
>>> rpm = 4.10.2-1.fc18
>>> rpm(x86-64) = 4.10.2-1.fc18
>>> 
>>> 
>>> mmh, my first thought had been this would show up in there, but obviously, it's not, even with the stock f18 rpm
>>> so digging further I found references here and there to --showrc; I',m not sure that I captured that one, but here's what I get
>>> 
>>> root at mirror /mirror/fedora/updates/18/x86_64 # rpm -qp rpm-4.10.2-1.fc18.x86_64.rpm --showrc | grep rpmlib
>>> Features supported by rpmlib:
>>>   rpmlib(BuiltinLuaScripts) = 4.2.2-1
>>>   rpmlib(CompressedFileNames) = 3.0.4-1
>>>   rpmlib(ConcurrentAccess) = 4.1-1
>>>   rpmlib(ExplicitPackageProvide) = 4.0-1
>>>   rpmlib(FileCaps) = 4.6.1-1
>>>   rpmlib(FileDigests) = 4.6.0-1
>>>   rpmlib(HeaderLoadSortsTags) = 4.0.1-1
>>>   rpmlib(PartialHardlinkSets) = 4.0.4-1
>>>   rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix) = 4.0-1
>>>   rpmlib(PayloadIsBzip2) = 3.0.5-1
>>>   rpmlib(PayloadIsLzma) = 4.4.2-1
>>>   rpmlib(PayloadIsXz) = 5.2-1
>>>   rpmlib(ScriptletInterpreterArgs) = 4.0.3-1
>>>   rpmlib(VersionedDependencies) = 3.0.3-1
>>> 
>>> which already looks better indeed; except that it does not mention X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir...
>> 
>> The query above doesn't do what you probably think it does:
>> rpmlib() dependencies are provided by the running rpm instance, and cannot be provided by packages. So the "-qp rpm-4.10.2-1.fc18.x86_64.rpm" part doesn't make sense there - it will output the what "rpm -qp rpm-4.10.2-1.fc18.x86_64.rpm" would output, AND then --showrc additionally outputs the rpmlib() provides of the running rpm which in case of F14 is rpm-4.8.x IIRC.
>> 
>> You'd need to upgrade the host rpm to that of F18 (or F17) to have it provide the X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir magic. And even there it actually doesn't show up in --showrc because its, uh, rather special.
>> 
>>> 
>>> ---
>>> I am quite obviously missing the point here
>>> All I would like to achieve is to build an rpm that pretends to have the required feature - without any actual change, can anybody shed some light on how to do that ?
>> 
>> For your purposes it sounds like faking the thing should indeed be sufficient. Something like this should do the trick:
>> 
>> --- a/lib/rpmds.c
>> +++ b/lib/rpmds.c
>> @@ -962,6 +962,9 @@ static const struct rpmlibProvides_s rpmlibProvides[] = {
>>       (                RPMSENSE_EQUAL),
>>    N_("support for POSIX.1e file capabilities") },
>> #endif
>> +    { "rpmlib(X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir)", "1",
>> +       (                RPMSENSE_EQUAL),
>> +    N_("fake X-CheckUnifiedSystemdir provide") },
>>    { NULL,                            NULL, 0,        NULL }
>> };
>> 
>> 
>> ...but note that this needs to be applied to the host rpm building the vm images. Ie apply the above to F14 src.rpm, rebuild and install on the F14 host.
>> 
>> 	- Panu -
>> 
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> 