Home / server / Questions / 82243
Accepted
Robert Munteanu
Asked: 2009-11-07 07:55:30 +0800 CST

Building an rpm file with a unique qualifier appended

  • 772

I'm building RPMs in a continuous integration environment, and I need to distinguish between successive builds, but obviously the spec file does not get modified on each checkin.

The spec file header contains something like

Version:        1.0beta7
Release:        1.1

I'd like to override it so that the the built RPM will have a qualified appended to the version, e.g.

Version:        1.0.beta7.2913

Assuming that the qualifier is already available, as an environment variable, what's the easiest way of appending a qualified to the version?

rpm

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Fairly easy:

    Version: 1.0.beta7.%(echo $ENVVAR)

    You can run whatever command you want inside %(); just make sure there's no whitespace in the output.

    Personally, I think it's a touch cleaner to stick it in a variable at the top:

    %define buildnumber %(whatever command to get the build number)

Version: 1.0.beta7.%{buildnumber}

    Or to make it conditional on the variable being set:

    Version: 1.0.beta7%{?buildnumber:.%{buildnumber}}

    That should only print the '.' if %buildnumber is set.

    • 8

  2. The problem with this approach is that such specs require an externally-defined parameter (buildnumber)... for example re-building an .src.rpm file will most probably yield a different version number than the one originally used by your CI system.

    I think what you really want is embed the source version (e.g., subversion revision number) into the RPM version number. I generate RPM .specs from templates. The template is source-controlled and the build process generates a real spec file from it, so

    Version: 1.0.beta7.svn@SVN_REV@

    becomes something like

    Version: 1.0.beta7.svn1234
    • 2