I upgraded from the version of RPM that came on Red Hat 6.0 (rpm-3.0 I believe) to rpm-4.0-6x and rpm-devel-4.0-6x so that I could install some things that came in the new format RPMs. This worked fine, including the --rebuilddb and the install of the new RPMs, but the resulting rpm command seems incapable of building RPMs from source. I.e., rpm -bp spec-file fails with a general usage message for rpm. Thus I can now not do ANYTHING with my source RPMs. By comparison, the rpm-4.0-4 installed under Red Hat 7.0 works fine (although I don't want to try and install it on my 6.0 machine because it needs Python 1.5.2 which I can't switch to yet). PLEASE: come out with a version of rpm-4 that works under Red Hat 6.x. I'm getting desparate.
Did you install the rpm-build package? This is necessary in order to be able to build packages with rpm 4.0.x
What he said :-) Yes, all the build modes in rpm-4.0 are in a separate executable called /usr/bin/rpmbuild contained in the rpm-build package.
I have not seen any rpm-build which is part of the rpm-4.0-6x family. Note, with the older rpm that came with Red Hat 6.0, everything was in rpm and rpm-devel. If this exists, could you please tell me where it is? I don't think that another rpm is going to help. Observe the behavior or rpm that came in rpm-4.0-6x: if you run rpm -bp xxx it complains with a generic usage message as if it didn't understand the -bp option. If you do this with a working rpm then it will complain that xxx doesn't exist. It looks to me like the command line argument processing is busted. Am I being fooled?
ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/dist/rpm-4.0.x/rpm-build-4.0-6x.i386.rpm perhaps?
Ah, that fixed it. rpm-build didn't exist on Red Hat 6.0, only rpm and rpm-devel. Note, with only rpm-4.0-6x and rpm-devel-4.0-6x, I got only a usage message as if it didn't understand the -bp argument. In general I like RPMs, including making my own, but the error messages when things go wrong are not so great. Any way, thanks again.