The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Fri, 02 May 2008

Building RPMs in SCons

Here's a recipe I've developed for building a RPM in SCons with out too much mucking around. My big issue with RPM is the whole /usr/src/redhat thing which is silly from a permissions point of view, and also prevent multiple users on the same machine from building at the same time.

import string, os

# Sources for RPM

arch = 'i386'

sources = [
    'foo.spec',
    'foo-upstream.tar.gz',
    'bippity.patch',
    'flippity.patch',
]

# Create RPM build environment

env = Environment()

env.Append(
    ENV = {'HOME': os.environ['HOME']},
    TARFLAGS = '-z')

# Build tar file of sources

tarfile = env.Tar(
    'foo.tar.gz',
    sources)

# Build RPM from tarfile with included spec

rpm_defines = {
    '_topdir': Dir('#build').abspath,
}

rpm = env.Command(
    'rpm_dummy',
    tarfile,
    'rpmbuild %s -tb %s' % (
        string.join(['--define "%s %s" ' % (i[0], i[1])
                     for i in rpm_defines.items()], ' '),
        tarfile[0]))

# Take care of creating and removing various temporary directories
# required by RPM.

env.AddPreAction(rpm, Delete('#build'))

env.AddPreAction(rpm, [Mkdir('#build/SPECS'),
                       Mkdir('#build/BUILD'),
                       Mkdir('#build/RPMS/%s' % arch)])

env.AddPostAction(rpm, [Delete('#build/BUILD'),
                        Delete('#build/SPECS')])

# Clean up after ourselves

env.Clean(rpm, ['#build/BUILD', '#build/SRPMS', '#build/RPMS'])

I like the use of pre and post actions here to create the directory structure expected by RPM and the cleanup of it afterwards. Running scons -c will delete all the generated RPM files as well as the tar file of sources.

Oh yeah, installing and using ccache is absolutely essential for debugging RPM files.