[WBEL-users] Building WBEL-compatible RPMs on Debian

[Edward Rudd]

Daniel J. Summers wrote:
> Edward Rudd wrote:  
[snip]
> Right - I understand that.  (I've used SimplyMEPIS for a while, but I
> miss having the 64-bit support - and, the last I heard, there are no
> plans for a 64-bit MEPIS...)  I know that they have a tool called
> rpm2deb that allows you to create DEB packages from an RPM, I just
> didn't know if they'd have something like that in reverse - and, if
> they did, would it work?  :)
eh.. not usually very well from my experience. (there is a program
called alien that does that).

[snip]
> Maybe, but it sounds like something that would be a good experience -
> do you know of a good HOWTO on setting up that sort of environment?  I
> heard "chroot" tossed around ever since I started using RH
> derivatives, and I've looked it up in the man pages, but I still don't
> quite understand what that does.
>
chroot stands for Change Root.  chroot is actually a unix thing and not
specifically a RH thing. Basically when you chroot you change the
effective root (ie /) for the application to something different.  It is
often used as a security measure (like with FTP servers).  so if you
chroot and ftp daemon to /var/ftp  then the ftp daemon sees /var/ftp AS
it's / and is unable to get to any directory outside of that directory.

With an RPM building setup using Mach or dar (I am personally using dar
to do my building, from dag.wieers.com). But you would have a complete
install of the WBEL install in directory on your system (ie
/var/dar/el3) and you would chroot into that directory and do your rpm
building. thus the rpm and gcc and other utilities would be run with the
copies in that directory and not the debian versions.  as they would not
even know the debian files even existed as far as they are concerned.

There is a rpm-tools list on lists.rpmforge.net (run by Dag Wieers)
which is a good start for asking questions about the helper utilities
(dar and now it's replacement pydar) to work with a chrooted install. 
As with dar/pydar you can have several different distributions installed
in chroots and build them all on the same system.. (el3, el4, FC3, fc4,
etc..) It's pretty spiffy stuff.

there should be docs in the pydar package as well. I have to recall how
I even got the wbel3 installed in the chroot.. I believe it was just
installing the base packages using RPM and specifying the --chroot
option.but if your host is debian that may be a little more challenging:-D.

i'd suggest checking the rpm-tools list as that list is more targeted
toward figuring this out than the WBEL list. So I'll catch you on the
rpm-tools list.