Changes required for RPM Build

[mbhangui]

So I spent some time setting up opensuse build service (obs) for notqmail. The RPM builds are available at

https://software.opensuse.org//download.html?project=home%3Anotqmail&package=notqmail

This is work in progress and I still have to start creating the necessary files needed for debian builds (rules, changelog, notqmail.dsc, etc).

The good thing is that notqmail will build on all the known linux distros. So far notqmail was found to build successfully on the following distros
centos7, centos6, rhel7, rhel6, FC30, opensuse Tumbleweed, opensuse leap 15.1, opensuse leap 15.0, suse linux enterprise 15 (& SP1), suse linux enterprise 12 (sp1, sp2, sp3, sp4)

To build binary packages, following are the issues (all suppressed by creating rpmlintrc file) and by modifying instchown.c,

• non fhs compliance
• instchown needs the same destdir changes as was done in instpackage.c. I will raise a separate pull request for all changes after I complete the debian build
• all calls to chown to be skipped when instchown is run with non-root uid. This is because rpm and debian builds is built using non-privileged user
• The license file COPYRIGHT is termed as illegal for suse builds. Somehow opensuse wants a known license like GPLv3, BSD, etc. So I have to figure out this license problem
• creating a systemd unit file to start qmail-send. I have modified hier.c to install notqmail.service in /var/qmail/boot
• The binary builds shouldn't be shipping /var/qmail/queue. It should be created during rpm/debian installation. This will require modification to hier.c and a seperate binary like queue-fix (e.g. /var/qmail/bin/queue-fix /var/qmail/queue) which will create the queue when invoked.

[mbhangui]

The url for the notqmail package on obs is at
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:notqmail/notqmail

[DerDakon]

Running instchown in this sort of package builds isn't actually required, one could instead specify the needed users/groups in the rpm file. When you are not root don't call it.

The instchown DESTDIR thing IMHO also belongs into 1.07 as that is most of the purpose of exactly that change.

The systemd service file can just be copied in the spec file, no need to touch hier.c for this.

What is wrong with the queue in rpm?

[DerDakon]

Does this work:

License: Public Domain

[schmonz]

+1 to providing a separate queue-create-and-fix program that can be avoided at build time and invoked at package-install time. I worked around this in pkgsrc by calling instpackage twice: once with DESTDIR to stage and package (and pkgsrc omits the queue from the package since it’s outside PREFIX), and a second time at package-install, ignoring errors, just before calling instchown on the installed files.

Can you say more about why instchown needs DESTDIR support? I didn’t need it for pkgsrc, so I’m wondering what’s different in other systems.

[mbhangui]

Running instchown in this sort of package builds isn't actually required, one could instead specify the needed users/groups in the rpm file. When you are not root don't call it.

Good idea. Yes. We can modify the Makefile and skip calling instchown when the user is not root.

The instchown DESTDIR thing IMHO also belongs into 1.07 as that is most of the purpose of exactly that change.

Yes. The RPM build fails without the changes.

The systemd service file can just be copied in the spec file, no need to touch hier.c for this.

That was my original plan. But on second thoughts I thought all startup related files belong in /var/qmail/boot. Also systemd is so ubiquitous now. We need to add it in the documentation somewere on how to start qmail-send, svscan, etc using systemd. I will put it as part of the spec/rules file with few echo statements.

What is wrong with the queue in rpm?

The timestamp of the directories and files in the queue directories keep on changing. If these directory/files, belonging to /var filesystem are part of the RPM package, it creates a problem when we do rpm --verify notqmail. All of these show as having been modified, indicating changes made to the RPM package.

[mbhangui]

Can you say more about why instchown needs DESTDIR support? I didn’t need it for pkgsrc, so I’m wondering what’s different in other systems.

@schmonz without the DESTDIR support, while building the RPM, instchown tries to create directories in /var/qmail, which fails because rpmbuild is running with a non-privileged userid.

[mbhangui]

Does this work:

License: Public Domain

It failed.
[ 36s] notqmail.src: E: invalid-license (Badness: 100000) Public Domain
[ 36s] notqmail.x86_64: E: invalid-license (Badness: 100000) Public Domain
[ 36s] The specified license string is not recognized. Please refer to
[ 36s] https://spdx.org/licenses/ for the list of known licenses and their exact
[ 36s] spelling.

The full list of acceptable license is here
https://spdx.org/licenses/

The one that comes closest to Public Domain is this
https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-PDDC.html#licenseText

[schmonz]

Can you say more about why instchown needs DESTDIR support? I didn’t need it for pkgsrc, so I’m wondering what’s different in other systems.

@schmonz without the DESTDIR support, while building the RPM, instchown tries to create directories in /var/qmail, which fails because rpmbuild is running with a non-privileged userid.

Okay, that helps me ask a more precise question: why does instchown need to run while building the RPM? I would expect installing the RPM package to

1. Install a bunch of programs, docs, etc.
2. Install instchown as one of them (e.g., pkgsrc will install it to PREFIX/share/qmail/setup/instchown)
3. Post-install, run instchown and instcheck

Here's the notqmail-ready version of my install script for pkgsrc.

Another question, are you using instpackage (possibly via the new "package" Makefile target) when building the RPM?

[mbhangui]

Can you say more about why instchown needs DESTDIR support? I didn’t need it for pkgsrc, so I’m wondering what’s different in other systems.

@schmonz without the DESTDIR support, while building the RPM, instchown tries to create directories in /var/qmail, which fails because rpmbuild is running with a non-privileged userid.

Okay, that helps me ask a more precise question: why does instchown need to run while building the RPM? I would expect installing the RPM package to

1. Install a bunch of programs, docs, etc.
2. Install instchown as one of them (e.g., pkgsrc will install it to PREFIX/share/qmail/setup/instchown)
3. Post-install, run instchown and instcheck

Ok. This is what i will do

1. do not run make setup in the RPM build
2. Call instpackage to install the packages

Do the following in postinst

1. Create the queue
2. run instcheck

Here's the notqmail-ready version of my install script for pkgsrc.

I see that you are also running config-fast. That would complete the notqmail setup for binary installations. I will follow your steps.

Another question, are you using instpackage (possibly via the new "package" Makefile target) when building the RPM?

Yes. It gets called because I do a make setup to install the binaries in BUILD_ROOT/var/qmail

[schmonz]

Another question, are you using instpackage (possibly via the new "package" Makefile target) when building the RPM?

Yes. It gets called because I do a make setup to install the binaries in BUILD_ROOT/var/qmail

Aha! If my mental model of building packages applies to the RPM world, setup is too big a target to call. Instead, call package, which does the subset of setup that doesn't require any qmail users or root access.

[mbhangui]

Aha! If my mental model of building packages applies to the RPM world, setup is too big a target to call. Instead, call package, which does the subset of setup that doesn't require any qmail users or root access.

It is the same here. That's why I skip all calls to chown (because non of the users exist on the machine where RPM is being built). The user/group creation is done in postinst

/usr/bin/getent group nofiles > /dev/null || /usr/sbin/groupadd nofiles || true
/usr/bin/getent group qmail > /dev/null || /usr/sbin/groupadd qmail || true

/usr/bin/getent passwd alias > /dev/null || /usr/sbin/useradd -M -g nofiles -d %{qmaildir}/alias -s /sbin/nologin alias || true
/usr/bin/getent passwd qmaild > /dev/null || /usr/sbin/useradd -M -g nofiles -d %{qmaildir} -s /sbin/nologin qmaild || true
/usr/bin/getent passwd qmaill > /dev/null || /usr/sbin/useradd -M -g nofiles -d %{logdir} -s /sbin/nologin qmaill || true
/usr/bin/getent passwd qmailp > /dev/null || /usr/sbin/useradd -M -g nofiles -d %{qmaildir} -s /sbin/nologin qmailp || true
/usr/bin/getent passwd qmailq > /dev/null || /usr/sbin/useradd -M -g qmail -d %{qmaildir} -s /sbin/nologin qmailq || true
/usr/bin/getent passwd qmailr > /dev/null || /usr/sbin/useradd -M -g qmail -d %{qmaildir} -s /sbin/nologin qmailr || true
/usr/bin/getent passwd qmails > /dev/null || /usr/sbin/useradd -M -g qmail -d %{qmaildir} -s /sbin/nologin qmails || true

[mbhangui]

The build has been created successfully without modifying instchown or any file in the distribution. Thank you @schmonz and @DerDakon

[mbhangui]

The debian builds have got completed successfully. I installed one of them (debian 7) and it worked. Now I still have few things left on the plate

1. The installation doesn't call /usr/sbin/alternatives to install notqmail as an alternative mta. There are few things required to make it so. e.g. man page for sendmail. services for smtp, pop3, etc which will require ucspi-tcp. So for the time being I have shelved this task.

2. For the debian builds, the permissions of the binaries were all default. So I had to modify the build to copy instchown to /var/qmail/bin and run that in postinst script. Maybe /var/qmail/bin isn't the right place for instchown as it shouldn't be something that the user will execute it often. Perhaps /var/qmail/sbin

3. There is no point in have /var/qmail/man/man3. I have removed this in the debian build. WIll modify the rpm spec file to remove this for the RPM builds too

4. The email id for maintainer, I have used mine temporarily. We should decide on some standards, some of which @alanpost has discussed in his email about IRC bot notifications. OBS build failures can also be sent to an email id.

5. I have to complete few things for the binary builds - namely running config-fast, etc and create few default qmail control files, just like what @schmonz demonstrated above in his pkgsrc. I plan to complete those this week.

6. There should be a directory for out-of-tree builds where we can put miscellaneous items like the RPM spec file, rules file so that they come under git verison control. Refer to Add support for out-of-tree build #26

7. I have to test the binary installation. Once that is complete, I will create a dockerfile on github, which can automatically create docker builds for all the linux distros configured in OBS. Creating the dockerfile is trivial. An example of a dockerfile (which I use for indimail) is pasted below. It will require little changes to adapt it for notqmail.

From ubuntu:xenial
MAINTAINER cprogrammer

\# Freshen RUN apt-get -y update
RUN export HOSTNAME=indimail.org DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
    && mkdir -p /root \
    && apt-get -y update \
    && apt-get install -y wget gnupg2 \
    && wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:mbhangui/Debian_9.0/Release.key -O - | apt-key add - \
    && echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mbhangui/xUbuntu_17.04/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/indimail.list \
    && apt-get -y update \
    && apt-get -y install \
        debianutils \
        less \
        man-db \
        net-tools \
        openssh-server \
        openssl \
        procps \
        systemd \
        systemd-sysv \
        telnet \
        strace \
        lsof
        vim \
    && apt-get -y install mrtg indimail \
    && /usr/sbin/svctool --config=cert --postmaster=postmaster@indimail.org --common_name=indimail.org >/dev/null \
    && echo 'PermitRootLogin yes' >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config \
    && unset HOSTNAME
COPY .alias .bash_profile .bashrc .exrc .gfuncs .glogout .indent.pro .vimrc /root/

[mbhangui]

BTW the debian builds include ubuntu. Also I can turn on the builds for ARM architecture on OBS. But I doubt if anyone will be looking forward to have notqmail on raspberrypi and clones. I use daemontools, ucspi-tcp, qmail built on obs for my very low jitter music mpd player based on volumio/dietpi https://www.allo.com/sparky/piano-dac-2-1.html