Big, big safety problem in for subversion/trunk/kpackages/rpm/rhel-5/Makefile

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nk...@gmail.com>]

I'm staring at the current Makefile for building RHEL packages, with
an eye towards getting in the RPMforge published tweaks into that
code. So far, so good, except 3 issues.

* RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 4 is nightmarish to build without updating Python
and a stack of other components. Unless someone's got a graceful way
to do it without major reconstruction of your local OS, they should be
discarded.

* The neon requirement in the .spec file for THEL 5 seems too
aggressive: it comes with neon-devel-0.25.5, and my preliminary tests
with subversion-1.7.0 base code work well with that.

* The sqlite requirement is normally handled for RHEL 5 by bundling
the "sqlite-amalgamation-3.t.13.tar.gz" recommended software. It's not
clear how to best bundle that into the Subversion repository itself
for RHEL 5 use, but it needs resolution for building on that OS.

* The %_sourcedir, %_builddir, etc. settings in .rpmmacros are all
lowercase. This does not match RedHat's standard of using BUILD,
SOURCES, RPMS, etc. for directory names for rpm configurations.

And biggest concern of all, because this *breaks* things.

* There's a build dependency that overwrites a user's
$HOME/.rpmmacros. This is hazardous in a development environment: it
will break the developer's other work. The easy way round that one is
to use "rpm --showrc" to extract the user's own settings for %_topdir,
and follow the RHEL defaults for RPMS in %{_topdir}/RPMS, sources in
%{_topdir}/SOURCES, etc. I'm looking into that. Then don't *touch* the
user's .rpmmacros, it's entirely unnecessary.