I want to have a rpm package build with Copr1. My current build target list is Fedora 35, 36, rawhide and Centos 7 and Stream 8. I have not yet created the copr project.
Compiling on one of my machines, the package builds successfully on the Fedora variants with mock. The problem is that on Centos variants one of the build dependencies and some of its dependencies are not available. I have found appropriate srpm files and compiled them on one of my machines with the Centos Stream 8 (one of them required two custom patches). With those custom dependencies I am able to successfully compile the original package.
So just to be clear, the problem is that the spec file contains for example
BuildRequires: libsomething
where libsomething is available as a plain upstream package in some of the build targets while needs an additional custom repo for some other build targets.
The FAQ says the following about dependencies:
Can I depend on other packages, which are not in Fedora/EPEL?
Yes, they just need to be available in some yum repository. It can either be another Copr repo or a third-party yum repo (e.g jpackage). Click on “Edit” in your project and add the appropriate repositories into the “Repos” field. Packages from your project are available to be used at build time as well, but only for the project you are currently building and not from your other projects.
But this sounds like an all or nothing approach, and I absolutely do not want to override the already existing upstream packages, only provide them when they are missing.
So what strategy do people use to handle this?
Update: I have now created copr projects and made some attempts at building (after resolving dependencies of dependencies in several levels), but the problem is as I describe above. If I add copr://hlovdal/projectname as a build dependency then epel-8-x86_64 compiles fine because it is provided with the missing dependencies while fedora-35-x86_64 fails because the repository does not have any fedora packages. If I remove the repo epel fails while fedora succeeds.
I also attempted to add the base url from the corresponding /etc/yum.d.repo file, and only hardcode epel instead of $distname hoping that the fedora builds would just ignore non-existing/wrong repo setting, but the build does not like that and still fails.
1 Copr is Fedora's freely available build system.
