[wplug] Building redhat from source

[Vanco, Donald]

James O'Kane wrote:
> On Fri, 23 May 2003, Vanco, Donald wrote:
>> There may be a way to unpack each src RPM and tweak the
>> spec file for alternate architectures (e.g. i686), but that would
>> take longer than installing Gentoo! (not to mention require a couple
>> TB in disk space to actually unpack & build against all the RPMs)
> 
> cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
> for x in *.spec
> do
> 	echo $x; rpmbuild --target i686 --quiet  -ba $x
> done
> 
> 
> It takes 39 hours 31 minutes 24.335 seconds.
> However, that includes about 12 hours where it was waiting for user
> input. The imapd package was trying to patch pine I think.
> 
> It requires about 10 gigs of disk space:
	You could likely lessen that by adding the --clean, --rmspec and (I
think) --rmsource (possible src?) options
	Another option would be to -bb (as opposed to -ba) and build only
the installable binaries (as opposed to -ba which also re-builds the source)

> 140 packages (of the 838 total) failed for uninvestigated reasons.
	Yes - but look at the packages in question - some pretty "heavy
hitters" there...
	Did you, in fact, have ALL the "-devel" packages installed?  If not
- that's a likely reason for many failures (and why I eventually did my
rebuild against an "everything install" of RH)
	Some packages are just plain "noarch" - so that's likely a few of
them...

	There's a listing in the spec file on what architectures are
supported - although I forget exactly what line would give you that info (a
crafty grep will do) so there is likely a way to script what you've done
against a set of "known i686" spec files and then a companion build against
those that are i386, noarch, or whatever....

> There is also the issue of packages being compiled with the currently
> installed i386 libraries. I think if one were to install from these,
> and recompile again that would help, but I'm not _that_ bored.
	Curious - what did you do the compile on (OS, version and
architecture (i.e. speed))?  Your time is FAR better than the 283 packages I
rebuilt on a 4-way Xeon IBM x440 (took me 4 days - but much was duplicated
effort before I finally did an "everything" install)

	You're well on your way to a good "How To"...... now if you were
really bored you'd figure out a way to do it with "rebuild" so that the src
RPM never has to get installed at all....   :)

	H-P offers a "test drive" program where you can actually get control
of a system running Linux - this might be a cool thing to try on one of
their machines...  I've noticed quite a few packages in Gentoo where the
maintainers mention (and thank) H-P for this program.  Aside from anything
else, it'll let a PC guy get his hands on an Alpha.

Don