Re: [gcmd-usr] Gnome Commander 1.6.4 released

[Uwe Scholz]

Hi Ken,

thank you very much again for taking the time to report the problems
you had when creating the Gnome Commander RPM.

I actually did not have the spec file on my mind a long time as I
did not need it on my Gentoo Linux. (Some weeks ago I switched to
Fedora, though, but this is another story...).

> Yesterday I could not spell RPM. Now I have (almost) built one :-)
> 
> After doing some reading it seems that I can produce a
> gnome-commander rpm thus:
> 
> rpmbuild -ta gnome-commander-1.6.4.tar.xz
> 
> However, the rpmbuild process wanted a .bz2 file. Having nothing to 
> loose I renamed the tarball gnome-commander-1.6.4.tar.bz2. 

This is a problem caused by the spec file as it assumes the default
extension is bz2. I pushed a fix to the git repository for the next
bugfix release.

As a workaround you could use the command
rpmbuild -ta --define 'srcext .xz' gnome-commander-1.6.4.tar.xz

> I tried again and got a message re. missing packages.
> 
> error: Failed build dependencies:
>      unique-devel >= 0.9.3 is needed by 
> gnome-commander-2:1.6.4-1.el7.centos.x86_64
>      exiv2-devel >= 0.14 is needed by 
> gnome-commander-2:1.6.4-1.el7.centos.x86_64
>      taglib-devel >= 1.4 is needed by 
> gnome-commander-2:1.6.4-1.el7.centos.x86_64
>      poppler-devel >= 0.18 is needed by 
> gnome-commander-2:1.6.4-1.el7.centos.x86_64
> 
> I recognize unique-devel as something which was fixed I think in
> 1.6.2 as it was not really needed and it does not exist in
> RHEL/CentOS 7. I installed the other dependencies EVEN THOUGH THEY
> ARE NOT REQUIRED FOR THE MANUAL BUILD.  I found 2 references to
> unique-devel in gnome-commander.spec.  I commented them out.  This
> time the rpmbuild process seemed to do a lot more work.

I think the spec file in the Gnome Commander package is a relict of
former times in which developers wanted to make life of users easier.
For example for those who use distributions not shipping a desired RPM.
I would therefore prefer to leave all libraries in that file, although
they are not mandatory.

It is up to you to uncomment the libraries or not - it depends on your
role as the RPM creator. An example: If you want the RPM to be
distributed to other users, they might want to have Gnome Commander be
compiled with libunique support. But you could say that you do not want
to support systems with that library, so you should uncomment it. The
same decision must be taken for the other three libraries.

To compile Gnome Commander with libunique support, you have to install
the unique-devel package of your distribution before executing the
rpmbuild command.

But yes, after one of the last bugfix releases, libunique is optional
now. This means, uncommenting the library in the spec file will not
lead to problems when building Gnome Commander.

> It ended with these messages:
> 
> Checking for unpackaged file(s): /usr/lib/rpm/check-files 
> /home/ken/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT/gnome-commander-1.6.4-1.el7.centos.x86_64
> error: Installed (but unpackaged) file(s) found:
>     /usr/share/appdata/gnome-commander.appdata.xml
>     /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.gnome-commander.enums.xml
> /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.gnome-commander.gschema.xml
>     /usr/share/gnome-commander/mime/XMLnamespaces
>     [...]

This is also a bug in the provided spec file of the Gnome Commander
repository. I fixed this problem by inserting the following lines in
the "%files" section of the spec file:

%{_datadir}/%{name}/mime/
%{_datadir}/appdata/%{name}.appdata.xml
%{_datadir}/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.%{name}.enums.xml
%{_datadir}/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.%{name}.gschema.xml

> As I am a TOTAL beginner to rpm building I may perhaps show my
> ignorance but here are a couple of things which I believe may need to
> be done....
> 
> 1 - Remove the unique-devel dependency in the "official" 
> gnome-commander.spec file.
> 2 - Also remove the other 3 dependencies  from the .spec file if they 
> are truly not needed.
> 3 - As to the missing files, allow me to observe
> 
>   - They are present on my CentOS 7.3 machine running gnome-commander 
> 1.6.2 as updated from the nux repository
>   - The files are not present on the machine on which I built the 
> program manually. In fact, /usr/share/gnome-commander does not exist. 
> gnome-commander seems to work fine
>   - I installed the gnome-commander 1.6.2 package from nux-dextop on
> a fresh CentOS 7 install. It works fine and
> the /usr/share/gnome-commander directory is not present on that
> machine either.
> 
> Perhaps these files need to be removed from wherever they are listed
> in the tarball(?)

See above :)

I hope that helps!

Best wishes
Uwe