Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 57893
RPM manpage out of date: lists illegal build option --test
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:01 EDT
Description of Problem: The RPM man page states: --test Do not execute any build stages. Useful for test- ing out spec files. but RPM does not accept the --test option for build commands, such as rpm -ba. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): $ rpm -q rpm rpm-4.0.2-8 How Reproducible: Every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. unpack any .src.rpm 2. run a command similar to $ rpm -ba --test egenix-mx-base.spec Actual Results: --test: unknown option Expected Results: I expected the option to function as described in the man page. :) Additional Information: rpm --help does not list the --test option for rpm build. The man page does. The command does not accept it. I'm not sure whether this is a bug in RPM (not accepting --test) or a bug in the man page (listing --test). This bug is especially annoying since the versions of the _Maximum_RPM_ book currently available online list this option. The documentation situation for RPM is really deplorable. As a programmer who also groks makefiles and has used Red Hat since 5.2, I was surprised how difficult it was to find adequate clear and *current* documentation for creating my own RPMs. It would help if the existing documentation didn't lie. ;-) I also kept step-by-step notes for creating a .spec file. I'd clean them up if you'd like to include them in /usr/share/doc/rpm-4.0.2/, but I'm not sure how to submit such documentation. A separate feature enhancement request?
I just upgraded to Red Hat 7.2, and the man page no longer lists --test as a build option. So it appears that the bug is already resolved...unless you want more documentation.