[MiNT] binutils 2.18 cross-rpm

[Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr>]

Hello.

Short story:
I made an experimental rpm with my latest binutils 2.18 build.
It is available here:
http://vincent.riviere.free.fr/soft/m68k-atari-mint/archives/unsupported/binutils-2.18-2.m68kmint.rpm
After downloading it, you can safely upgrade as usual with the command:
rpm -U binutils-2.18-2.m68kmint.rpm

You can check the installed version with the command:
ld --version
GNU ld (GNU Binutils for MiNT 20080406) 2.18

I forgot to increase the stack in those binaries, so I recommend you to 
run the following command after installation:
stack -S 256k /usr/bin/ar


Long story:
My goal is to use the cross-compiler as much as possible, and avoid the 
use of the slow native compilation in order to produce software for our 
favorite platform. I have provided some MiNT binaries in the form of 
.tar.bz2 archives, the next step is to convert them into .rpm files.

If you don't already know, my favorite build platform is MS Windows and 
Cygwin.

I managed to build a binary rpm with Cygwin's RPM 4.1, but unfortunately 
it doesn't want to install on EasyMiNT with RPM 3.0.6.
When trying to install the package, it fails with the following error:
error: failed dependencies:
rpmlib(PartialHardlinkSets) <= 4.0.4-1 is needed by binutils-2.18-2

So I temporarily gave up, and used the native RPM to build the package.

I made the tests with the package "binutils-2.18".

Two files are provided here:
http://vincent.riviere.free.fr/soft/m68k-atari-mint/archives/unsupported/

The first is named binutils-2.18-2.m68kmint.rpm
It is the resulting binary rpm, no surprise. You can upgrade as usual 
with rpm -U, it will replace the old binutils in /usr.

The second one is named binutils-2.18-2.m68kmint.rpm-howto.txt
It is the script I used to make the binary RPM.
It is *very* crappy. Note it is the very fist time I make a RPM file, 
and it is not the clean way.
Basically, I unpack the .tar.bz2 archive with Cygwin, I write a spec 
file, then I switch to ARAnyM in order to build the rpm file.
There is an additional problem: rpm is unable to build a rpm on a hostfs 
partition. It just hangs before writing the file. So I copied everything 
to an ext2 partition before building the rpm.

This way of making rpms is bad, because it is not fully automated, it is 
a mix of cross and native stuff. Even worse, there is no source rpm.
But it may be useful for distributing some test software, especially 
when it cannot be easily compiled natively.

Even if it is not clean, I prefer to share that little work.

--
Vincent Rivière