Building RPM of ansible 1.0 -- issues encountered

Archives Ansible Project
1

Hi,

This is in RHEL6:

I'm trying to build ansible with 'rpmbuild -tb <tarball>' by re-creating ansible-1.0.tar.gz

Issues:

1. Minor - rpmbuild and the spec file assume ansible-1.0.tar.gz containing a directory called ansible-1.0. I built this myself by unzip'ing and re-creating the tarball.

2. Bigger issue:

Lots of refs to man3 and other docs in the spec file that break rpmbuild because those files don't exist when I tried to build:

My diff -u commenting out those lines

2

Builds fine in EPEL and I regularly do "make rpm" in CentOS 6.

If you are trying to build clean go through the Makefile.

3

I tried "make rpm" and it works (in RHEL6). However, I think it should be possible to just download a tarball of the source and run "rpmbuild -tb ..." against it.

From poking at this, it seems "make rpm" does more than just rpmbuild

against the spec file contained inside the tarball would achieve.

In particular, the man3 docs, that seem to be generated here:

4

This is down to the github not giving you a way to distribute distribution tarballs from there - so you end up downloading their tar snapshot of the release tag instead, which isn't the same thing.

Michael's distribution tarballs were produced by the sdist Makefile action - which had pre-built the docs before packaging. Github's tar snapshots do not include this.

So we can make the spec file work by adding a make docs stage (but this increases the build requirements).

Fixing the tar directory name is a different issue.

  Nigel.

5

Yeah, we build either from the release tarballs (ansible.cc/releases)
or a git checkout.

The github auto-generated tarballs are messed up, but we can't do
anything about github.

6

OK. Thanks for the explanation.

Can the documentation on ansible.cc be updated to make this clearer? Apologies if I missed it.

At the moment, "Downloads and Documentation" just leads to documentation on the use of ansible, and downloading/installation instructions are buried further down than clicking on such a link might lead one to believe. And they're git-centric.

There's a separate GITHUB link at the top level, but that serves a more experienced audience, IMHO.

7

Yeah, we can explain the 'buidling your own RPMs' part a little more.

--Michael