Everything old is new again. 'mock' and various SUSE tools have done this for a decade or more.<p>I'm waiting for the fun to start when they realize that using a different kernel from the one the distro is designed for causes all sorts of crazy-hard-to-find bugs. Been there with mock, several times.<p>Here was one of my favorites, which took weeks to diagnose:
<a href="https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-02/msg00823.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-02/msg...</a>
Generating a source rpm is not required to build a binary rpm, so I don't get the point of this tool. All you need to build a binary RPM is a .spec file. The spec file can then determine how to build and package it, like using sources already on disk, downloading sources, using a list of pre-compiled or noarch files, etc.<p>Building RPMS is typically a platform-specific thing, because most distributions bastardize their systems to be incompatible with others' RPMs. RPMs provided by vendors and 3rd parties typically shove everything into /opt and depend on very little to work around this. If you want your package to be portable you should probably do the same.
Does anyone have a use for a tool to assemble an RPM without using a .spec file and the rpmbuild process? I.e., something that works on a combination of pre-built binaries (in a .tar file) along with a .manifest file?<p>I was putting something together like that a while ago for packaging up software for internal use, that we get from outside vendors. I can dig it up and throw it on Github if anyone is interested.