Friday, January 20, 2006

Builds for old dist with new deps is a pain

Yesterday we realised, from a helprequest, that our last K(P)owersave release for SUSE 10.0 was complete broken. They was build against 10.1 STABLE tree, but not against 10.0. But this was only the start of a long and painfully build session to get new packages. Powersave needs new cpufrequtils which needs new sysfsutils. I thought I need only do this against --distset=10.0:
  • build sysfsutils
  • build cpufrequtils with --prefer-rpms=(...) path to sysfsutils
  • build powersave with --prefer-rpms=(...) path to sysfsutils and cpufrequtils
But this did not work. The mbuild fetched up the prefered rpms and it looked also that them where installed, but it didn't work. After myriad of trials to build them and checking all build logs I found out that the mbuild didn't used the prefered rpms. I don't know why mbuild is so stupid. At least I added the sysfsutils package to --extra-packs and also to needforbuild - and it worked then. I don't know why this dependency between cpufrequtils and sysfsutils together with --prefer-rpms was not resolved by mbuild. Sometimes I really hate the SUSE build system or is rpm the problem?

Btw. We wondered, that (K)Powersave was together nearly 140 times downloaded for SUSE 10.0 and only one of them saw the problems with the rpms.

Feel free to download the new packages for SUSE 10.0 ... or Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu ... bugreports would be really appreciated.