Linux – %post section of rpmbuild not working

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Situation: I'm trying to build a custom rpm to place a config file in a particular location. The installation completes fine by placing config files in proper directories but the %post section is not working. This section echoes user to make an input and 'reads' it. This read value is to be placed in those config files with help of 'sed'.

Issue: 'read' is not working in the %post section ie. the installation process does not wait for user to provide input. It basically completes the installation by placing files in the directories. In short, the %post section is not being interactive for user to provide input.

Please see the SPEC file here: http://pastebin.com/5BgkJUpG . This will help to get the idea.

I wrote the exact same lines of %post section above for "postint" section of building a .deb package and it worked fine there. User installing the deb package was able to make the input and this given value was placed in the config file with 'sed'.

Best Answer

I don't believe that RPMs were intended to be able to be ran interactively. You're making a couple of dangerous assumptions in that the RPM is not being installed by configuration management in an automated way or a GUI front end. Neither scenario bodes well for an RPM that expects input from the shell.

Maybe I can suggest an alternative? Is this prompt for the hostname of the target host? I.E. could your sed include $(hostname) rather than getting input from stdin?

I found this reference to someone attempting the same. Their suggestion was to get the input in %pre some how?

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If the file you're replacing is already named in the specfile (i.e. you're really replacing it) then you need only replace the file during your build (typically done with a patch to the original source, but you could always replace the file in the original source archive, too). If you're adding a file, then you'll want to add the file to the "%files" section of the specfile.

I'd recommend having a look at the Packaging software with RPM series from IBM. It's very good, and will give you a lot of useful background on the subject.

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Unfortunately, cron(1M) doesn't accept any signals to reread crontabs. The way the crontab(1) tool communicates with cron is through interprocess communication (see the source). That said, it seems that crontab is probably the best tool you could use to modify a user's crontab. You could write a script that adds/deletes/modifies the crontab and use it as follows:

EDITOR=<your script> crontab -e <user>

The script takes one argument, a name of the file that holds a copy of that user's crontab, processes the file, and exits with return code 0. crontab then will signal cron that a user's crontab has changed. In case you end up with an empty crontab, though, you have to change strategies and use

crontab -r <user>

instead. A bit annoying.

The other possibility would be to just restart cron after your modification with

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but that requires su or at least the solaris.smf.manage.cron right.

Best Answer

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