Can we execute unix command inside %install section? - linux

I have created an rpm without source using the binary file I had been provided. In a nutshell, I am trying to automate a silent install of sybase client via an rpm. However I need help whether we can put the following silent install command in the %install section of the spec file -
setup.bin –f <responseFileName> -i silent -DAGREE_TO_SYBASE_LICENSE=true -DRUN_SILENT=true
Any help will be much appreciated.

If you want a script to be executed when you install a package, it must be put in the %post section. According to your comment, this is what you did.
The problem is that if you run the install script that way, rpm will not be able to track the installed files. It will not know that those files belong to the package, will not remove them when you uninstall the rpm, will not handle updates properly, etc. You will have a broken rpm.
If you can't build a proper rpm, just use a simple install script that does what you want.

Related

Failing to install Sublime Text 3 in Ubuntu 16.04 using apt-get command

I had downloaded sublime previously directly from the browser as tarball and saved it in a folder (and of course extracted it).But this way I wasn't able to make Sublime my default editor and it didn't feature as an application when I tried to open a text file with a right-click.I read somewhere installing sublime text 3 using commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-installer
will solve my problem. So I directly deleted the Sublime_text3 folder saved in my Downloads directory and then used the given commands. But when I entered the 3rd command line I got the following error(just writing the error part):
subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:/var/cache/apt/archives/sublime-text-installer_3126-2~webupd8~1_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Can anyone explain why this error is coming and suggest a way to solve this problem? Also if anyone can tell how I can set Sublime as my default text editor from the tarball downloaded from the sublime text 3 website. Thanks in advance!
you can try this command to install Sublime Text using Snap Store..
sudo snap install sublime-text --classic
I'm not sure overall how to fix that error or what's going on (I use Slackware and not Ubuntu/Debian), but for a long while there have been official Sublime repositories several different Linux distributions, including Ubuntu/Debian.
It's highly recommended that you use those if you want to go the package route and not use existing solutions such as the one referenced in your question or in the other response here, if for no other reason than only the official repository is guaranteed to contain an unmodified version of Sublime. Additionally the official repositories are always updated on release, which may or may not happen in a timely manner in other repositories.
The links referenced above contain instructions on how to set up and use Sublime from those repositories, and if you have any issues a good place to ask is the forum.
One thing to note which isn't mentioned explicitly in the above pages is that to use the official repositories, you should:
Choose only one of them (stable or dev, noting that you need a license to run a dev version) and not add both repositories or things will not work as expected
Ensure that other repositories that you've added (such as the one in your question) are removed to make sure that the package system definitely pulls the correct package
There are a couple of ways to go if you want to install Sublime from the tarball version. The easiest way would be to extract it, then manually set up launcher shortcuts and so on based on what falls out. How exactly you would register it as a text editor in that case, I'm not entirely sure since I don't use the same distribution as you.
Presuming that the process would be easier if Sublime was installed in a way similar to how the package manager would do it, the tarball comes with a desktop file and icons, so the following steps can be used to (presumably) do what the package installer would do.
The proviso here is that although these steps work on my non-Ubuntu machine, I don't know if all of the referenced tools are installed by default on an Ubuntu system, so so more setup work may be involved.
Note also that the files in the tarball are not entirely self-consistent, which makes this a little bit more work.
First, you need to extract the tarball (replace tarball filename as appropriate for location and build):
cd /opt
sudo tar xvf ~/Downloads/sublime_text_3_build_3176_x64.tar.bz2
This creates the folder /opt/sublime_text_3/ and fills it with the contents of the tarball.
Next, you want to install the icons contained in the tarball. As far as I have been able to tell, the icons in the tarball aren't in the correct directory structure, requiring each to be copied into place individually. We also need to update the icon cache to ensure that the new icon is noticed by the system:
cd /usr/share/icons/hicolor/
sudo cp /opt/sublime_text_3/Icon/16x16/sublime-text.png 16x16/apps/
sudo cp /opt/sublime_text_3/Icon/32x32/sublime-text.png 32x32/apps/
sudo cp /opt/sublime_text_3/Icon/48x48/sublime-text.png 48x48/apps/
sudo cp /opt/sublime_text_3/Icon/128x128/sublime-text.png 128x128/apps/
sudo cp /opt/sublime_text_3/Icon/256x256/sublime-text.png 256x256/apps/
sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f -t .
Now we want to install the sublime_text.desktop file that is in the tarball. Note however that like the icons, it seems kind of broken; the tarball extracts to sublime_text_3 but the desktop file assumes that the application is actually in /opt/sublime_text instead.
As such, you either need to rename the folder that was extracted to sublime_text to match what is in the desktop file, or edit the desktop file to make the path correct.
The following steps assume that we want to keep the folder the same and rewrite the desktop file. These commands will generate a new file named sublime_text_3.desktop with the changes.
cd /opt/sublime_text_3/
sed -e "s^/sublime_text/^/sublime_text_3/^" sublime_text.desktop | sudo tee sublime_text_3.desktop
Now you can install the desktop file. You do that with desktop-file-install, passing it the name of the desktop file. For accessing Sublime from the command line, you also want to set up a subl link to the installed copy of Sublime.
Adjust the paths as appropriate here if you decided to rename the folder instead of editing the desktop file:
sudo desktop-file-install sublime_text_3.desktop --rebuild-mime-info-cache
sudo ln -s /opt/sublime_text_3/sublime_text /usr/bin/subl
At this point Sublime should show up as an installed application, or at least it does in my Window Manager; if not, executing sudo update-desktop-database may help refresh it.
You can try this once. i hope it will help
wget https://download.sublimetext.com/files/sublime-text_build-4126_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i sublime-text_build-4126_amd64.deb

Rpm-spec file. running yum groupinstall

Good afternoon,
I am currently building an RPM that has some requirements I have not found answers to on the web. I have narrowed this down to a single question.
Normally when I run an install from command line, one of the steps has me run the following command yum groupinstall "Compatibility libraries" which installs 32-bit compatibility libraries on my 64-bit desktop. I am wondering if there is a way to accomplish this in the Requires: field of my RPM-spec file, as I have only found a way to require very specific RPM's for dependencies?
I could always add in the 10-15 individual packages that get installed with yum groupinstall "Compatibility Libraries", but I was hoping there was a better option.
Description of RPM:
My RPM is very basic in nature. It will untar multiple tar files into various locations, overwrite files throughout the main install directory, install compatibility libraries, and then proceed to startup a service.
If anyone needs more information to what I am trying to accomplish please let me know. Thank you.
You can only require specific packages, not groups, in your Requires: lines. You should absolutely not run yum in your %post script, because then (a) you are then hiding your dependencies, and nobody likes to see things get installed that they didn't expect, and (b) you will probably end up getting stuck because yum in %post would need to wait for the existing yum process to exit.
For library Requires:, the rpm build process will generally figure things out for you. You still need to manually specify the appropriate BuildRequires: dependencies, which are things that are required to build the package.
If you want to update your question with more details (e.g., a link to the spec file and a description of what you're trying to do, if it's not obvious from the spec), maybe we can come up with better solutions.

How to override anaconda/kickstart package ordering?

I am building a bootable ISO to be used to install a Linux image (Oracle Linux, 5.8). This is using anaconda with a kickstart file to select the packages to be loaded. Some of these packages are failing with dependency problems in their %post section.
Eg, this is seen in /root/install.log after the installation is complete:
Installing thirdparty-tools-1.00-09.noarch
/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.97891: line 1: ln: command not found
/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.97891: line 2: ln: command not found
/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.97891: line 3: ln: command not found
/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.97891: line 4: ln: command not found
error: %post(thirdparty-tools-1.00-09.noarch) scriptlet failed, exit status 127
I'm trying to find out if it is possible to control/override the package ordering, without editing any RPMs to add dependencies. I've been looking through the anaconda / kickstart documentation (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart#Chapter_3._Package_Selection), and searching extensively elsewhere, so I think that the answer is actually 'no, you can't do this'. Which would be a shame.
The problem is that I am trying to include various third-party RPMs, which are not under my control and which have been digitally signed. These include some processing in a %post section. This processing requires some standard Linux commands, eg 'ln', 'touch', etc, which are supplied within the coreutils package. The third-party package does not currently include a dependency on the coreutils package, though obviously it should really. Anaconda uses its own partial ordering algorithm to choose what order to install these packages, and the third-party packages are being installed before the coreutils package. Obviously, the proper solution is to get these RPMs fixed by the third-party; however, this is likely to take too long.
I was hoping that their might be some hidden / un-documented option for the kickstart file, which could add in extra dependencies. Ideally, I'd like to be able to add something like this to the %packages section:
%packages
#admin-tools
#base
#core
#system-tools
thirdparty-tools
# We would like to add some magic command to indicate a missing dependency
thirdparty-tools dependson coreutils
So, my question is: Is it possible to control or override the package ordering without editing any RPMs to add dependencies?
Very many thanks for any help.
If you can't get the source RPM, you can use rpmrebuild to re-create the RPM:
rpmrebuild -e -n -d . -p thirdparty-tools-1.00-09.noarch
This will bring up a re-created spec file in your default editor, where you can make changes to the requires lines. Also, you may want to change the package name too, so that your re-built version is differentiated from the upstream vendor's version (I usually append "-local" to the package name).
Your package "thirdparty-tools" needs to specify all of its requirements. If you can get a SRPM of this package, you can modify the spec to indicate that you need coreutils, bash, etc in your package.
If you can't modify this package at all, your best option is to create a wrapper package that has the necessary requirements. Just use your favorite editor to create a file "thirdparty-tools-installer.spec" and ensure you include coreutils as a requirement as well as "thirdparty-tools". You can refer to rpm.or for more information http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/s1-rpm-build-creating-spec-file.html
Lastly, you can just do yum -y install thirdparty-tools in the %post section of Kickstart. It's uglier for sure, but it will probably work.

Run time installation directory of debian package contents

I have a debian package that I built that contains a tar ball of the files, a control file, and a postinst file. Its built using dpkg-deb and it installs properly using dpkg.
The modification I would like to make is to have the installation directory of the files be determined at runtime based on an environment variable that will be set when dpkg -i is run on the deb file. I echo out the environment variable in the postinst script and I can see that its set properly.
My questions:
1) Is it possible to dynamically determine the installation directory at runtime?
2) If its possible how would I go about this? I have read about the rules file and the mypackage.install files but I don't know if either of these would allow me to accomplish this.
I could hack it by copying the files to the target location in the posinst script but I would prefer to do it the right way if possible.
Thanks in advance!
So this is what I found out about this problem over the past couple of weeks.
With prepackaged binaries you can't build a debian package with a destination directory dynamicall determined at runtime. I believe that this might be possible if installing a package that is built from source where you can set the install directory using configure. But in this case since these are embedded Ubuntu machines they don't have make so I didn't pursue such an option. I did work out a non traditional method (hack) for installing that did work. Since debian packages simply contain a tar ball relative to / simply build your package relative to a directory under /tmp. In the postinst script you can then determine where to copy the files from the archive into a permanent location.
I expected that after rebooting and the automatic deletion of the subdirectory under /tmp that dpkg might not know that the file package existed. This wasn't a problem. When I ran 'dpkg -l myapp' it showed as still installed. Updating the package using dpkg/apt-get also worked without a hitch.
What I did find is that if you attempted to remove the package using 'dpkg -r myapp' that dpkg would try and remove /tmp which wasn't good. However /tmp isn't easily removed so it never succeeded. Plus in our situation we never remove packages but instead simply upgrade them.
I eventually had to abandon the universal package due to code differences in the sources resulting in having to recompile per platform but I would have left it this way and it did work.
I tried using --instdir to change the install directory of the package and it does relocate the files but dpkg fails since the dpkg file can't be found relative to the new instdir. Using --instdir is sort of like a chroot. I also tried --admindir and --root in various combinations to see if I could use the dpkg system relative to / but install relocate the files but they didn't work. I guess rpm has a relocate option that works but not Ubuntu.
You can also write a script that runs dpkg-deb with a different environment for 6 times, generating 6 different packages. When you make a modification, you simply have to run your script, and all 6 packages gets generated and you can install them on your machines avoiding postinst hacking!
Why not install to a standard location, and simply use a postinst script to create symbolic links to the desired location? This is much cleaner, and shouldn't break anything in dpk -I.

Why does my hand created deb package fails at install with "unable to create" on files?

I made a perl script that creates a deb binary package from scratch.
I created the data, control, etc.
But when I run dpkg -i on my deb package it complains that it is unable to files from data.
Example:
unable to create '.dpkg-new'(while processing ''): No such file or directory.
I have downloaded some .deb packages to look at and they do not use the preinst script to create the directory structure.
I am thinking I am doing something wrong, I consider having to create my own directories in preinst but it does not seem right... perhaps I am missing something?
Do I have to create directories where my files from data will be copied in the preinst sh, or should dpkg do it and I am doing something wrong?
I had the same problem in a Ruby script I wrote.
I was generating a list of files to pass to tar when building the data.tar.gz archive. When I ungzip and untared the archive manually it would deflate fine, but dpkg would fail.
It turns out that the list of files must also include each directory to create as well.
Note that when I created data.tar.gz I built it with nearly the same options as dpkg-deb/build.c does in the dpkg-1.15.8.11 source.
execlp(TAR, "tar", "-cf", "-", "--format=gnu", "--null", "-T", "-", "--no-recursion", NULL);
Instead I used
IO.popen("gnutar -czf - --format=gnu -T - --no-recursion", "r+")
In addition to what #Arrowmaster said, check the http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ for some detailed explanation of the files. After you build the package itself, you can check it with lintian tool to see if there is anything obvious you might have missed.
If any one looks for a solution to the problem:
"Build a deb package from an rpm spec file."
Look here http://www.deepnet.cx/debbuild/
I have made my own perl build script much simple then the mentioned one so I can easily maintain it.
Some useful knowledge gained in the process:
0. the deb is an ar archive that contains 3 files, the order of the files is important.
1. the scripts from control.tar.gz must be made executable.
2. it is good to have a preinstall script to make directories if dirs do not exist.
3. sometimes dpkg decides to unzip your zips (this happened if the zip was the only file in the data.tar.gz) so check for that in an postinstall script.
4. when you tar.gz some files be sure to chmod to the dir that contains the directory structure for your tar.
You should not attempt to manually create a .deb binary package by hand. The Debian New Maintainers' Guide covers how to get started creating a Debian package using the correct tools.
Your hand created package may look correct to you but because it is not installing it is obviously flawed in either a minor way that you have not noticed or in a more serious way that is not visible to you (for example most people don't realize a .deb is actually an ar archive).
There are lots of reasons for this. You really need to run:
dpkg -i -D1110 mydeb.deb
And post the result to have any hope of someone being able to solve the problem.

Resources