How to specify a fallback package for unpackaged files?

[DaanDeMeyer]

For hacking on systemd, I'm looking into building rpms from upstream sources. Because we're building from upstream sources, there are naturally unpackaged files depending on how the %files directives are handled. I would like to assign any unpackaged upstream files that haven't been explicitly assigned to a package yet to the systemd package. Is there any way I can specify to rpm that any unpackaged files should be assigned to a specific package?

[pmatilai]

No.

systemd is widely packaged already, I'd pick up an existing spec as a basis instead of reinventing the wheel.

[pmatilai]

That's a workflow problem really. Making rpm look the other way is not a solution.

[pmatilai]

That said, you can already make rpm ignore unpackaged files. Just flip %_unpackaged_files_terminate_build to zero.

[DaanDeMeyer]

@pmatilai I found that flag, but that's not a solution, we want these new files to actually get packaged so we can install the development with those new files so we can run tests with them.

Anyway, the Fedora spec already handles this by dynamically generating the files lists so I'll probably try to work the suse spec maintainers to do the same thing.

[DaanDeMeyer]

So what I ended up doing is something like the following:

build() {
    # TODO: Replace meson_build and meson_install overrides with "--undefine __meson_verbose" once
    # https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/12835 is available.
    rpmbuild \
        -bb \
        --build-in-place \
        --define "_topdir /var/tmp" \
        --define "_sourcedir rpm" \
        --define "_rpmdir $PACKAGEDIR" \
        --define "__check_files sh -c '$(rpm --eval %__check_files) | tee /tmp/unpackaged-files'" \
        "$@" \
        rpm/systemd.spec
}

if ! build; then
    EXIT_STATUS=$?
    if [ ! -s /tmp/unpackaged-files ]; then
        exit $EXIT_STATUS
    fi

    # rpm will append to any existing systemd.lang so delete it explicitly so we don't get duplicate file
    # warnings.
    rm systemd.lang

    cat /tmp/unpackaged-files >>rpm/files.systemd
    build --noprep --nocheck
fi

Basically we run rpmbuild once and if it fails, we check if there are any unpackaged files. If there are unpackaged files, we append those to the files.systemd file which lists the files of the systemd package and then run rpmbuild again with --noprep and --nocheck.

To get the unpackaged files, we override the __check_files macro and have it write its output to /tmp/unpackaged-files in addition to writing it to the standard output.

[lnussel]

interesting hack. Would be nice if rpm could do that natively indeed. Would help a lot to build git head of software based on the spec file of a stable version. Might actually be doable by breaking the loop in processBinaryFiles() into a two stage process.