Archive for the Packaging (RPM) category
Version comparison using rpm
Posted on Thu, Feb 20, 2025 at 11:35 by Hubertus A. Haniel
I have been playing a little bit with ChatGPT and its code generators and while doing this I stumbled across this. I wrote about versiion comparison in a previos post which is sort of a common thing that keeps coming up and I have used the function that I refer to there lots of times. It seems that rpm actually has a build in function to do this which returns result codes so you can refer to this with a function like this but obviously it will not work on other platforms and it seems that this has not been available on all rpm versions but I do not know when it was introduced:
compare_rpm_versions() {
local version1="$1"
local version2="$2"
if [[ -z "$version1" || -z "$version2" ]]; then
printf "Error: Two versions must be provided\n" >&2
return 1
fi
if ! command -v rpm &>/dev/null; then
printf "Error: rpm command not found\n" >&2
return 2
fi
if rpm --eval "%{lua: print(rpm.vercmp('$version1', '$version2'))}" &>/dev/null; then
local result; result=$(rpm --eval "%{lua: print(rpm.vercmp('$version1', '$version2'))}")
case "$result" in
1) printf "%s is newer than %s\n" "$version1" "$version2"; return 0 ;;
0) printf "%s and %s are identical\n" "$version1" "$version2"; return 0 ;;
-1) printf "%s is older than %s\n" "$version1" "$version2"; return 0 ;;
*) printf "Error: Unexpected comparison result: %s\n" "$result" >&2; return 3 ;;
esac
else
printf "Error: Failed to compare versions\n" >&2
return 4
fi
}
Edited on: Wed, Jun 04, 2025 15:00Posted in HowTo (RSS), Packaging (RPM) (RSS), Shell Scripting (RSS), System - Linux (RSS)
Creating upgradable rpm packages (-Uvh)
Posted on Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 11:23 by Hubertus A. Haniel
When creating rpm packages one should bear in mind that during a package upgrade the pre and post install and uninstall scripts are also run and it can happen that modifications are executed that you may not want to execute during the upgrade eg removal of files in a postuninstall which will actually still be needed after the upgrade. I belive the postuninstall is actually being run after the package has been upgraded. To get around this one should use the following framework:
%pre
if [ "$1" = "1" ]; then
Do stuff that should happen during initial installation.
elif [ "$1" = "2" ]; then
Do stuff that should happen during upgrade.
fi
%post
if [ "$1" = "1" ]; then
Do stuff that should happen during initial installation.
elif [ "$1" = "2" ]; then
Do stuff that should happen during upgrade.
fi
%preun
if [ "$1" = "0" ]; then
Do stuff that should happen during removal of the package.
elif [ "$1" = "1" ]; then
Do stuff that should happen during upgrade.
fi
%postun
if [ "$1" = "0" ]; then
Do stuff that should happen during removal of the package.
elif [ "$1" = "1" ]; then
Do stuff that should happen during upgrade.
fi
Edited on: Tue, Mar 13, 2012 11:34
Posted in HowTo (RSS), Packaging (RPM) (RSS), System - Linux (RSS)
Verification-time script in rpm
Posted on Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 18:14 by Hubertus A. Haniel
This could be useful - found this in the rpm documentation while I was searching for something else so I thought I put it here for later :)
The %verifyscript executes whenever the installed package is verified by RPM's verification command. The contents of this script is entirely up to the package builder, but in general the script should do whatever is necessary to verify the package's proper installation. Since RPM automatically verifies the existence of a package's files, along with other file attributes, the %verifyscript should concentrate on different aspects of the package's installation. For example, the script may ensure that certain configuration files contain the proper information for the package being verified:
for n in ash bsh; do
echo -n "Looking for $n in /etc/shells... "
if ! grep "^/bin/${n}\$" /etc/shells > /dev/null; then
echo "missing"
echo "${n} missing from /etc/shells" >&2
else
echo "found"
fi
done
In this script, the config file /etc/shells, is checked to ensure that it has entries for the shells provided by this package.
It is worth noting that the script sends informational and error messages to stdout, and error messages only to stderr. Normally RPM will only display error output from a verification script; the output sent to stdout is only displayed when the verification is run in verbose mode.
Edited on: Sat, Sep 24, 2011 18:39Posted in HowTo (RSS), Packaging (RPM) (RSS), System - Linux (RSS)
nosrc.rpm files
Posted on Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 17:43 by Hubertus A. Haniel
It is rather often that we have to package up binaries in rpm format for which there are no sources available and the vendor does not supply them in rpm format. - For this the best way to do this is using the NoSource tag in the SPEC file,
When building the RPM the result is apart from the package you want is also that rather then having a src.rpm as the source rpm you end up with a nosrc.rpm file. This nosrc.rpm file will only contain the spec file and not the sources that have been specified. This can be quite handy to grab files out of a running system.
So in the header of the SPEC file you would have something like
Source0: some.binary.%{_target_cpu}
NoSource: 0
As this binary will be architecture specific in most cases you should also ensure that you set the ExclusiveArch tag to ensure that the package does not get rebuild with the wrong architecture as a target. In this case I have two architecture specific binaries and with the above %{_target_cpu} the correct one gets selected when I specify the --target parameter on rpmbuild. My ExclusiveArch tag is set as below:
ExclusiveArch: i586 x86_64
An example of a package where I have used this concept can be found here.
Edited on: Sat, Sep 24, 2011 18:38Posted in HowTo (RSS), Packaging (RPM) (RSS), System - Linux (RSS)
Welcome - Notes from a Linux/Unix Engineer
Posted on Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 11:11 by Hubertus A. Haniel
I used to collect notes documents and HOWTO's at http://www.rootunix.org which are now archived at http://www.unixcook.com/old-unix-docs/ as it was difficult to maintain and I got lazy with it. I have come across a cross-platform blog software called Thingamablog which is written in Java so it works on Windows and Unix and I am hoping that it will enable me to publish useful notes at a quicker pace with not a lot of messing around.
We will see how successful that will be....
Posted in Automation (RSS), HowTo (RSS), Packaging (RPM) (RSS), Shell Scripting (RSS), System - AIX (RSS), System - Apple / OSX (RSS), System - Linux (RSS), System - Solaris (RSS), System - Windows (RSS), Virtualization (RSS)
