Bacula^® - RPM Packaging FAQ

1. How do I build Bacula for platform xxx?
2. How do I control which database support gets built?

3. What other defines are used?
4. I'm getting errors about not having permission when I try to build the packages. Do I need to be root?
5. I'm building my own rpms but on all platforms and compiles I get an unresolved dependancy for something called /usr/afsws/bin/pagsh.

Answers

1. How do I build Bacula for platform xxx? The bacula spec file contains defines to build for several platforms: RedHat 7.x (rh7), RedHat 8.0 (rh8), RedHat 9 (rh9), Fedora Core (fc1), Whitebox Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3.0 (wb3), Mandrake 10.x (mdk) and SuSE 9.x (su9). The package build is controlled by a mandatory define set at the beginning of the file. These defines basically just control the dependancy information that gets coded into the finished rpm package. The platform define may be edited in the spec file directly (by default all defines are set to 0 or ``not set''). For example, to build the RedHat 7.x package find the line in the spec file which reads

           %define rh7 0
           

   and edit it to read

           %define rh7 1
           

   Alternately you may pass the define on the command line when calling rpmbuild:

           rpmbuild -ba --define "build_rh7 1" bacula.spec
           rpmbuild --rebuild --define build_rh7 1" bacula-x.x.x-x.src.rpm
   

2. How do I control which database support gets built? Another mandatory build define controls which database support is compiled, one of build_sqlite, build_mysql or build_postgresql. To get the MySQL package and support either set the

           %define mysql 0
           

   to

           %define mysql 1
           

   in the spec file directly or pass it to rpmbuild on the command line:

           rpmbuild -ba --define "build_rh7 1" --define "build_mysql 1" bacula.spec
   

3. What other defines are used? Two other building defines of note are the depkgs_version and tomsrtbt identifiers. These two defines are set with each release and must match the version of those sources that are being used to build the packages. You would not ordinarily need to edit these.
4. I'm getting errors about not having permission when I try to build the packages. Do I need to be root? No, you do not need to be root and, in fact, it is better practice to build rpm packages as a non-root user. Bacula packages are designed to be built by a regular user but you must make a few changes on your system to do this. If you are building on your own system then the simplest method is to add write permissions for all to the build directory (/usr/src/redhat/). To accomplish this execute the following command as root:

           chmod -R 777 /usr/src/redhat
   

   If you are working on a shared system where you can not use the method above then you need to recreate the /usr/src/redhat directory tree with all of it's subdirectories inside your home directory. Then create a file named .rpmmacros in your home directory (or edit the file if it already exists) and add the following line:

           %_topdir /home/myuser/redhat
           

5. I'm building my own rpms but on all platforms and compiles I get an unresolved dependancy for something called /usr/afsws/bin/pagsh. This is a shell from the OpenAFS (Andrew File System). If you are seeing this then you chose to include the docs/examples directory in your package. One of the example scripts in this directory is a pagsh script. Rpmbuild, when scanning for dependancies, looks at the shebang line of all packaged scripts in addition to checking shared libraries. To avoid this do not package the examples directory.