On Sun, 9 Sep 2007, Andy Green wrote: > Somebody in the thread at some point said: > > On Sun, 9 Sep 2007, Frank Cox wrote: > > > >> On Sun, 09 Sep 2007 03:47:33 -0400 (EDT) > >> "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> > >>> if someone wants to simply RTFS, it's a bit disconcerting to learn > >>> that you need to download another five source rpms to do it. > >> I don't know if this is useful in your situation, but I'm pretty > >> sure File Roller can "look inside" of srpm files and extract the > >> contents for you as desired. > > > > that might come in handy, but it still doesn't solve the fundamental > > problem of why a source rpm's "BuildRequires" value should affect the > > simple tarball extraction and patch application operation. > > > > just for fun, i edited mkinitrd's spec file and deleted all the > > "BuildRequires" lines, and the build prep worked just fine, so i'm > > convinced that a simple prep should be possible without taking the > > BuildRequires dependencies into account. now i just want an option > > that implements that. > > > > well ... what are you just sitting there for? get to work. :-) > > Not sure I got the point across that the %prep section in the spec > can contain arbitrary commands, not just %setup and %patch. Those > arbitrary commands might be executing things that are provided by > the BuildRequires. no, i caught that. but my point is that, if someone wants to simply RTFS, is any of that extra post-patch processing going to change the source? if not, then it's utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand, and there should be an easy way for someone to download a source rpm, unload the tarball and apply the patches without going any further and getting hassled by all the BuildRequires stuff. > You can then say, well, it should look at %prep and decide whether > to pull the BuildRequires in or not, but that sounds like a bad idea > in terms of complexity for a crummy "feature". You're presumably > planning to rebuild the thing at some point anyway. i don't think that's a safe assumption at all -- i don't think it's rpmbuild's job to guess what i'm eventually going to do with my downloaded source rpm. my case is a perfect example -- i just want to see the source code for "nash", nothing more. so an additional rpmbuild option to simply untar and patch seems like a reasonable (and trivial) suggestion. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca ========================================================================
