Setting up RPM Building for SME Server

	Skill level: Developer
	Risk of inconsistencies with Koozali SME Server methodology, upgrades & functionality is high. One must be knowledgeable about how changes impact their Koozali SME Server. Significant risk of irreversible harm.

Setting up RPM Building for SME Server

http://www.openfusion.net/linux/mocking_rpms

Mock is a Fedora project that allows you to build RPM packages within a chroot environment, allowing you to build packages for other systems than the one you're running on (e.g. building CentOS 4 32-bit RPMs on a CentOS 5 64-bit host), and ensuring that all the required build dependencies are specified correctly in the RPM spec file.

It is recommended that you use the latest CentOS 6 (64bit) version as a base http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/isos/x86_64/ I have verified this with CentOS-6.3-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso

You need to have EPEL repository configured as EPELs version of mock will be used

# Enable EPEL for Centos 6
rpm -Uvh http://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

So then the installation of mock is just:

Installing Mock

# Install mock and python-ctypes packages (the latter for better setarch support)
$ sudo yum --enablerepo=epel install mock python-ctypes

# Add yourself to the 'mock' group that will have now been created
$ sudo usermod -G mock [youraccount]

The mock package creates an /etc/mock directory with configs for various OS versions (mostly Fedoras). Shad has provided working configurations for SME Server here http://mirror.canada.pialasse.com/contribs/slords/mock/

Copy all the .cfg files into /etc/mock including overwriting the site-defaults.cfg

Testing building environment

You can then run a test by doing:

# e.g. initialise a smeserver-9-x86_64-base chroot environment
$ CONFIG=smeserver-9-x86_64-base
$ mock -r $CONFIG --init

which will setup an initial chroot environment using the given config. If that seemed to work (you weren't inundated with error messages), you can try a build:

# Rebuild the given source RPM within the chroot environment
# usage: mock -r <mock_config> --rebuild /path/to/SRPM e.g.
$ mock -r $CONFIG --rebuild ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/e-smith-runit-2.4.0-1.el6.sme.src.rpm
If the build succeeds, it drops your packages into the /var/lib/mock/$CONFIG/result directory:

ls -1 /var/lib/mock/smeserver-9-x86_64/result
build.log
e-smith-runit-2.4.0-1.el6.sme.noarch.rpm
e-smith-runit-2.4.0-1.el6.sme.src.rpm
root.log
state.log

If it fails, you can check mock output, the *.log files above for more info, and/or rerun mock with the -v flag for more verbose messaging.

Notes:

• Using the provided .cfg files I have verified smeserver-8-x86_64-base.cfg & smeserver-9-x86_64-base.cfg and managed to build e-smith-runit for SME 9
• the chroot environments are cached, but rebuilding them and checking for updates can be pretty network intensive, so you might want to consider setting up a local repository to pull from. mrepo (available from rpmforge) is pretty good for that.
• there don't seem to be any hooks in mock to allow you to sign packages you've built, so if you do want signed packages you need to sign them afterwards via a rpm --resign $RPMS.
• If you get an error message 'create archive failed cpio: Bad magic' then try 'yum update' as this appears to be a known problem on COS6.