Building RPMs

[Matthew Newton]

Hi,

Thought I'd have a look at building FreeRADIUS RPMs. I advanced
from RedHat to Debian over 15 years ago, so not at all familiar
with their repositories etc now. So apologies if the below is just
me being stupid.

With CentOS 7 (which I believe is equivalent enough to RedHat) I get

$ rpmbuild -bb redhat/freeradius.spec 
error: Failed build dependencies:
  hiredis-devel >= 0.10 is needed by freeradius-3.1.0-1.el7.centos.x86_64
  freetds-devel is needed by freeradius-3.1.0-1.el7.centos.x86_64
$

Neither of these two packages seem to be in the standard CentOS
repositories.  Same issue on Scientific Linux, which is also
RedHat based.

The README is rather unhelpful, pointing to a (IMHO) far too long
and unwieldy Red Hat FAQ on the wiki, which goes into all sorts of
generic discussion about Red Hat, and not about building
FreeRADIUS RPMs. The essential and unuseful gist being "don't
build your own RPMs, use ours".

Which would be fine if RedHat weren't stuck in the dark ages, and
actually provided a recent FR. (I guess they're slightly up on
Debian though.)

I think there should be an easy way for people to build RPMs, like
you can .debs.

Firstly, have I missed something? Are the two missing packages in
the official repositories, and I just need to know something to
get them available?

If not, I'm guessing you have to add unofficial repositories?
Seems crazy they don't support FreeTDS and REDIS though?

Thoughts -

 - building RPMs should be as simple as possible for anyone;

 - you shouldn't have to add extra unofficial repositories to do so;

 - if other features not in the official repositories are needed,
   maybe a second "-extra" spec file with instructions on how to
   add the extra required repos;

 - the RedHat page on the wiki needs seriously sorting out in to
   separate pages of useful: "How to build FreeRADIUS RPMs for
   RedHat systems" and not useful: "Why you should pay RedHat for
   their own support and not use the FreeRADIUS source to build
   your own RPMs".

Comments?

Thanks,

Matthew

(getting totally fed up of "I'm using 2.1.12 or 3.0.4" on -users,
and wanting something useful and easy to point people at...)


-- 
Matthew Newton, Ph.D. <mcn4 at leicester.ac.uk>

Systems Specialist, Infrastructure Services,
I.T. Services, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, United Kingdom

For IT help contact helpdesk extn. 2253, <ithelp at le.ac.uk>