[Mageia-dev] A question about BuildRequires and other RPM questions.

Fri Mar 8 12:18:03 CET 2013

Even as a programmer/electronics engineer (admittedly down at an 
+embedded level most of the time) some of this is going so far over my 
+head, it's a vapour trail in the sky.
+
+There are far too many acronyms of stuff I've not come across, for me to 
+even get the vaguest grasp of what's been talked about.
+
+I'm not sure what the answer is really, I thought maybe a you tube 
+tutorial might be a good idea, but even then, how do you know what level 
+to talk down to.
+
+No idea, for example. what iurt, mock are or do; how to make a minimal 
+install and keep making the system go back to minimal install when 
+creating the next RPM; what a btrfs subvolume is and other things.
+
+I still don't get this whole trial and error thing. It seems that you 
+might submit something to the repositories that someone finds doesn't 
+install because of a missing dependency and you redo it. Then you can 
+retry that for up to five goes before it finally works? That seems 
+crazy. I must have misunderstood.
+
+I have no problem learning stuff, I do it every single day in my work 
+and it's what makes it so enjoyable, but maybe I need to take smaller 
+steps first? No idea where to start or how to go about doing that 
+though. As I might not have any work in a week's time it would 
+potentially be an ideal time to learn, but maybe I'm just not the right 
+person to do this?
+
+
+
+On 28/02/13 21:18, Dan Fandrich wrote:
+> On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 03:25:41PM +0100, Guillaume Rousse wrote:
+>> Build dependencies are usually specified in installation
+>> instructions. For humans, of course. You may also try to parse the
+>> outpout of ./configure (or equivalent) script. In both case, there is
+>> not garanty then every build dependency will get specified.
+>
+> The other way is to work backwards by looking at the install dependencies
+> that rpmbuild discovered, or the NEEDED lines from objdump -x, and adding the
+> -devel versions of those libraries. That won't catch any compile-time-only
+> dependencies, though (like libtool, autoconf or flex) but it will give you
+> something to start from.  Note also that some programs will automatically
+> discover what optional libraries are available at build time and configure
+> themselves accordingly. So, if you miss some BuildRequires, you might end up
+> with a binary that works but is missing features.
+>
+>>>> Dan
+>
+