OBS Mailing List Summary, Week 45

by Nathan Cutler posted on 8th Nov 2013

Here is a summary of activity on the opensuse-buildservice mailing list during week 45:

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Back in October, Brian K. White had asked how to abort and restart a build that has hung for hours. He tried running osc abortbuild and osc rebuild – both commands returned ok but the build is still hung.

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Christoph Dwertmann reported a problem building a package with ruby as a build dependency. It works for Fedora 17 and 18, but appears to be broken on Fedora 19.

  • Klaus Kaempf noted that, since Fedora 19 couldn’t decide on a Ruby version, it is necessary to add rubypick to the .spec file for F19 builds, like so:
%if 0%{?fedora} == 19
BuildRequires:  rubypick
%endif

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Stefan Botter reported a problem on he has been seeing on his private OBS instances, which are using the OBS repos via interconnect, where repositories often get in to a state “The repository setup is broken, build not possible”. The scheduler log contains a “bad config” message for the repos when this happens.

  • Henne suggested that the problems may be caused by an unreliable network connection.
  • Stefan responded that it is more likely due to the heavy load on build.opensuse.org
  • Andreas Schwab noted that running obs_admin --deep-check-project should fix the problem.
  • Stefan confirmed that Andreas’s suggestion works, but he would like it better if the scheduler recognized the problem and ran the deep check itself, without human intervention.

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Ruediger Meier would like to see selinux enabled for the build machine, because he would like make check to also test selinux features.

  • In his response, Adrian noted that build environments are currently using one single kernel for all distros. This is because many of the distros ship with kernels that do not work properly in VMs. As a result: (1) the test of selinux features would be running against the wrong kernel, and (2) the test might break the kernel.

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Brian K. White wrote that he would like to build tmux for many older versions of SUSE. He was able to do so by changing %{make_install} in the current .spec file to:

%{?make_install} %{!?make_install:%{__make} install DESTDIR=%{buildroot}}

He would like to do something similar with other packages, but their maintainers are reluctant to support old targets, especially when this means adding such “ugly” lines to the .spec file. To get around this, he had the idea of handling the matter in his prjconfig like so:

%{!?make_install: %define make_install %{__make} install %DESTDIR=%{buildroot}}

But it doesn’t work.

  • Jan Engelhardt recommended dispensing with the macro altogether, i.e. make install DESTDIR="%buildroot" – which is better and cleaner in his opinion. It is also recommended by the openSUSE wiki. One can always install the hxtools-scripts package to get a “spec-beautifier”.
  • Greg Freemyer noted that spec-cleaner will remove that (by replacing it with %make_install), thereby effectively breaking the package for older versions of SLE.
  • Tomáš Chvátal issued a call for volunteers to help improve spec-cleaner – the proper way to do it is to leave %make_install and support older versions of SUSE (and other RPM-based distros) on the server side.
  • Guido Berhoerster wrote that he has rejected SRs with such changes in the past and will do so again. He agrees with Tomáš that the matter should properly be dealt with inside the macro.

At this point, a lively debate ensued.

(Entire thread here: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-buildservice/2013-11/msg00012.html)