[rrd-developers] spec file comments

[Bernard Li]

Hi Daniel:

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 3:38 AM,  <Daniel.Pocock at barclayscapital.com> wrote:

> Bernard, are you already re-working the spec file, or should I go ahead
> and do it?  Either way, I have some more comments on the subject:

Here's the patch for split-out rrd-cached subpackage:

http://therealms.org/oss/rrdtool/rrdtool.spec.rrdcached.patch

> I notice this is in the spec file:
>
>   %define pre rc9
>
> Is that still needed?  There are various references to this %{pre}
> variable, I just deleted them all to make it build without complaining.

Actually, %pre is a special macro for RPM (much like %post, %postun)
and should not be overloaded.  I have removed it in my patch.

> The versions are hard coded:
>
>   Version: 1.3.99908093000
>   Source0:
> http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/beta/%{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
>
> Is there any convenient way to auto-generate that field?  Ganglia
> includes a script for trying to work out the version based on the SVN
> revision, although that method is not perfect because of the way SVN
> works.  It would be nice to set this value correctly in each of the
> daily snapshots, so that people can just run rpmbuild -tb
> rrdtool-trunk-snapshot.tar.gz.

Yes it would be nice.  However, for Ganglia, I simply add the SVN
revision manually since the svn binary is not guaranteed to be
available on the build box...  There must be a better way to do
this...

> The rrdcached user and: rather than hardcoding the username, could we
> have:
>
> %if %{!?_with_rrdcached_user}
> %define _with_rrdcached_user rrdcached
> %endif
> ...
> %configure \
>   %{?_with_rrdcached_user} \
> ...
> %files
> %attr(0775 %{?_with_rrdcached_user} %{?_with_rrdcached_group}) %dir
> %{_localstatedir}/run/rrdcached
>
> /etc/default/rrdcached can be generated by configure as well (it needs
> to contain the user name).
>
> It would be nice to specify usernames with a command like:
>
>   rpmbuild -tb --with-rrdcached-user testuser --with-rrdcached-group
> testgroup rrdtool-XXX.tar.gz

In my patch I just hardcode the user as rrdcached.  I don't see a real
benefit to having this user-definable, however, as it currently stands
we have a problem with the ownership of the .rrd files created by
RRDtool via other programs (like Ganglia).  We need to come up with a
solution where both these applications and rrdcached have read/write
access to the rrd files.  For instance, rrd files generated by Ganglia
can be owned by nobody or ganglia.  rrd files created by Cacti will be
owned by cacti etc -- how to get rrdcached to play nice with this
setup...?

Cheers,

Bernard