[WBEL-devel] RPM problems

[Charles Lacour]

I'm replying to my own post in case anyone else gets bitten by the problem.

On Monday 08 December 2003 21:24, Charles Lacour wrote:
> This will probably turn out to be blindness/idiocy on my part, but I'm
> trying to install an RPM to a temporary directory to check it out, and it
> keeps blowing up on me.
>
> I _thought_, reading the rpm man page, that one specified "--root
> <directory>" to have everything go to someplace other than the normal. I
> entered the following command:
>
> $ rpm -vv --root /tmp/wb -i
> /loop2/RedHat/RPMS/redhat-logos-1.1.14.3-1.noarch.rpm
>
> (That's actually all one line -- Kmail wrapped it.) And this is what I got:

<snipped error log>
>
> Being a suspicious, paranoid type, I had made /tmp/wb owned by my ordinary
> id, "clacour", and ran the install command as that ID. As best I can tell,
> it's choking because it can't write to /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz. It is NOT
> (as best I can see) trying to write to /tmp/wb/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz.

This turned out to be the problem. You have to run the rpm command as root or 
the '--root' option won't work.

 FYI, somewhere in the process, it does a true chroot. To get things to work 
all the way through, I had to:

* mkdir -p var/lib/rpm (in my work directory)
* copy everything from /var/lib/rpm to var/lib/rpm
* mdkir -p var/tmp
* mkdir tmp bin sbin lib
* copy bash, cp, rm, chmod,mktemp to bin (the bin in my work directory), and 
recreate the link of sh --> bash.
* copy install-info to sbin.
* Copy the libraries for all of the above libraries for all of the above.

Consider that a starting point for your working directory, if you want to have 
one. Several of the things (cp, rm, install-info, mktemp) I needed because of 
the specific package I was using as a test case (zsh). They were needed by 
it's post-install script (and the doc clearly says it does a chroot before 
doing the %pre and %post scripts.)

Depending on what packages you try to install in it, you will need to copy 
other commands, almost guaranteed.

My whole working directory ended up about 45 MB, just for the infrastructure, 
and it's nowhere near general yet.

If you don't copy /var/lib/rpm to var/lib/rpm, you'll get all kinds of 
complaints about things missing. Copying the rpm databases fools it into 
thinking your system has them installed. (Actually, your system DOES have 
them installed, but rpm at that point is thinking "things inside this --root 
directory"). You could, of course, truly install all those packages, but 
you'd essentially be building a whole new system to test this rpm with.

This isn't that far short of that (or wouldn't be if I finished fleshing it 
out).  I'm not real crazy about doing rpm commands, as root, for a target 
system on my real system, though.

Anybody got a better way?