[Beowulf] cluster building advice?

[Jonathan Barber]

On 2 October 2012 09:36, Hearns, John <john.hearns at mclaren.com> wrote:
> Interesting.
>
>> Went to ftp.redhat.com and found:
>>
>> ftp://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Workstation/en/RHDevToolset/SRPMS/
>>
>> Downloaded and installed the SRPMS, installed the dependencies via
>> yum, and built the RPMS.
>
> I would like to recommend the "mock" [1] tool for building SRPMs in RH
> environments. It basically builds a minimal chroot and then builds the
> SRPM in the chroot using only the RPMs specified by the SRPM.
>
>
> Jonathan, that's very interesting.
>
> I find myself doing exactly that - I have one machine which I use as a build machine,
> And sure enough it has oddles of -devel packages installed, and I usually have to install one or
> two every time I see an interesting package to build.
>
> Does anyone know if there is an equivalent to this for SuSE.
> (Yes, Google is my friend. But mailing lists are sources of excellent information).

It's possible to use mock to build SuSE packages as well, but you have
to fiddle with it a bit to get the SuSE chroot built.

SuSE has it's own tool "build" which can be integrated into SuSE's
open build system [1] with the ocs toolset. You can get the build tool
(for lot's of distributions) from the OpenSuSE tool repo:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools/

The best place to find documentation is their wiki:
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Build_Service

They have some nice information about writing multi-distribution RPMs,
but I don't have a link to it right now.

The Open Build System allows you to build cross-distribution RPMs on
SuSEs infrastructure, but it can be slow at times which is frustrating
when developing the spec files. I also found that the RHEL RPMs can be
a little outdated, which can be was a pain when the older RPMs have
bugs in them (such as missing BuildRequire's).

[1] https://build.opensuse.org/

Cheers
-- 
Jonathan Barber <jonathan.barber at gmail.com>