[Cpan2rpm-general] --no-requires not working on RedHat 9

[Jon W. <jw...@ca...>]

It looks as though the version of RPM (rpm-4.2-0.69) on RedHat 9 (at
least) has a feature that prevents --no-requires from working. While I
accept that --no-requires is in general a 'bad thing', it's needed at
least to build perl-DBI since DBI includes an optional module that uses
Win32::ODBC, and Win32::ODBC simply can't be built on a Unix platform.

The problem is that this version of RPM only runs the dependency generator
script pointed to by __find_requires if _use_internal_dependency_generator
is set to 0. Unfortunately it's set to 1 by default (in
/usr/lib/rpm/macros). As a result the carefully-constructed custom
find_requires script that implements --no-requires never gets used and all
the dependencies find their way into the resulting RPM.

A work-around in to include

  %_use_internal_dependency_generator 0

in your ~/.rpmmacros file; a longer-term fix would be to include

  %define _use_internal_dependency_generator 0

in the generated spec file if a custom find_requires script is needed.

Jon.

-- 
Jon Warbrick
Web/News Development, Computing Service, University of Cambridge