Because I have to install multiple versions of Python on multiple Oracle Linux servers which are built via a kickstart process, I wanted to build a python rpm for our yum repository. I was able to build Python manually using 'make altinstall' which doesn't install over your default system Python installation, so I thought that would be the way to go.
After much trial and error, I managed to build an rpm starting with a .bz2 python 2.7 package - but now when I try to install it, I get an error:
error: Failed dependencies:
/usr/local/bin/python is needed by Python-2.7.2-1.i386
What the...??? Python is what I'm trying to install!!! And system default Python (2.4) is in /usr/bin/python!!! And my prototyping location for the python directory is /tmp/python2.7 (and the executable was /tmp/python2.7/bin/python2.7). So why is it looking in /usr/local/bin?
Here is the core of my RPM SPEC:
%prep
%setup -q
%build
./configure --prefix=/tmp/python2.7
make
%install
make altinstall
I take a closer look at the rpm build log and I see:
Requires: /bin/sh /tmp/python2.7/bin/python2.7 /usr/bin/env /usr/local/bin/python libc.so.6 libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.0)...[a lot more...]
Ok, so there's where /usr/local/bin comes in... Now, the question is, how is it determining these requirements? Did I specify something wrong? Do I need to override something?
Like many rpm newbies, I get the build part, but I don't really "grok" what happens at the end of rpmbuild and what actually gets put into the rpm file (other than the files you specify in %files) and then what actually happens when you do the rpm install.
Can anyone suggest why my install is failing or what I might read to understand why my rpm build is requiring what I'm trying to build?
You should be able to fix this issue by adding the following line to your spec file:
AutoReq: no
Here is my understanding of why this is necessary. When rpmbuild runs across .py files with a #! (shebang) it will automatically add the binary that the shebang specifies as a requirement. Not only that, if the shebang is #!/usr/bin/env python, it will add a dependency for whatever that resolves to (first python on $PATH).
You either need to turn off the automatic requirement processing or find all shebangs that will cause problems and change them to something else.