[Sugar-devel] Fedora's RPM format changes break mock in Debian/Ubuntu

[Bobby Powers]

Hello,

m_stone and I were attempting to get a mock Rawhide chroot setup the
other night (for testing the latest Sugar rpms in a confined way) and
ran into several blocking issues related to recent changes in Fedora's
RPM packaging setup.  The first was the use of XZ compression for
RPMs, which the Debian rpm package didn't have support for. This seems
to be fixed in the latest rpm package in unstable [1], and we were
able to independently rebuild the .deb with support for it as well.
The next problem was that Fedora seems to have enabled (and be using)
Lua scripting in RPMs.  This seems to be a fairly old [2] and unknown
[3] feature of RPM that is just beginning to be used.  Debian is
actually missing some of the Lua packages (posix and regex) needed to
enable this support, as noted in [4][5][6].  This testing was done in
Debian Sid and Ubuntu Karmic.

While I had heard about the move to XZ compression, I had not heard
about the decision to enable Lua support in base packages (i.e. bash
[7]).  Both of these changes to the features used in RPMs broke
Debian's (and presumably everyone else's) packages of RPM.  Is there a
low-volume list or wiki page where changes like these are posted so
that we don't have to discover them on our own?

yours,
Bobby

[1] - http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/r/rpm/rpm_4.7.1-1/changelog
[2] - http://blog.labix.org/2004/03/23/embedding-lua-interpreter-into-rpm
[3] - http://www.rpm.org/wiki/PackagerDocs/RpmLua
[4] - http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=538207
[5] - http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=538232
[6] - http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=538230
[7] - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=124495 -
seems to indicate that bash started using Lua scripting in January
'09, which probably means that F11 packaging is 'broken' under Debian
as well.  Debian's mock package is somewhat out of date, as it doesn't
have config files for releases past F8.