Tag: perl

When Perl and RPM don’t get along.

Sometimes when building rpm packages you will get an rpm that requires a file that it already contains. This seems pretty lame (which it is) but here is an example and a workaround.

Building a package for freepbx we see this output:

rpmbuild -ba freepbx.spec
Provides: config(freepbx) = 2.4.0-0
Requires(interp): /bin/sh /bin/sh
Requires(rpmlib): rpmlib(CompressedFileNames) <= 3.0.4-1 rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix) <= 4.0-1 Requires(post): /bin/sh Requires(postun): /bin/sh Requires: /bin/bash /usr/bin/env /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/php config(freepbx) = 2.4.0-0 perl(DBI) perl(FindBin) perl(retrieve_parse_amportal_conf.pl)

The file we don’t want is: “perl(retrieve_parse_amportal_conf.pl)”

What rpmbuild does is go through the list of files and run “ldd” against all executables to find required libraries.
It also goes through each perl file and looks for “use / require” flags to pull out required perl modules.
When a developer does a legitimate thing like ‘require “retrieve_parse_amportal_conf.pl“‘ to include functions and such into their program, rpmbuild sees that this file is needed adds it too it’s list of required files.

Now rpmbuild also goes through and looks for what packages/files perl programs provide. It does this by scanning through the files and looking for “package“. If you just have an include file with functions, you don’t have a complete module and won’t have the package statement either. Thus rpmbuild will never see your file provides itself! Fortunatly there are a couple work arounds.

In your perl file that rpmbuild is requiring you can define ‘ our $RPM_Provides = “yourfilename.pl” ‘. rpmbuild will pick this up and happily add it to the provided file list. The other method is slightly more complicated but works well if you don’t want to patch the source code.

In your rpm spec file under the %prep section after the %setup add the following code:

cat << EOF > %{name}-req
%{__perl_requires} $* |
sed -e '/perl(yourperlfile.pl)/d'
chmod 755 %{__perl_requires}

Where yourperlfile.pl is the file you want to exclude from the rpm requires check.
This should make your rpm build hapily and exlude that file from the requires check.

If you want to see the actuall files rpmbuild runs take a look at:



print system('echo');

This stumped me too, so I did some research.

From the Perl PIC Documentation:


And perldoc -f system:


And wait(2):




print system('echo');



print "RV: $?n";