From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.3) Gecko/20010802 Description of problem: When attempting to build source packages with rpm, rpm simply returns a usage message if rpm-build is not installed. There is no error message. This is poor because the rpm manpage documents the --rebuild options etc. but makes no reference to the need for rpm-build. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. rpm --rebuild any-source-package.src.rpm Actual Results: rpm returns its standard usage message. Expected Results: An error message e.g. --rebuild option not available because... Additional info: $ rpm -q rpm rpm-4.0.2-6x
rpm build modes moved to a separate executable, contained in the rpm-build package, over a year ago. What's left is legacy. Because of limitations in the popt exec command, there's no easy and/or obvious way to get anything other than a usage message if the rpm-build package is not installed. IMHO, this is as it should be, because the build modes have moved to a separate executable, with it's own man page (yes, the build modes need to be removed from rpm.8), it's own help message, etc. Expecting the old binary to document legacy options that are not present is unreasonable.