`python setup.py bdist_rpm` fails

[Alexander Belchenko]

I want to create RPM package for my custom Linux configuration. I ran `python setup.py bdist_rpm` (standard python distutils action) but it fails due missing manpage file.

This bug directly related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/125521.

For setuptools I wrote hackish workaround, but now problem arise again (for RPM).

There is some problematic points in current setup.py re bdist_rpm.

1) manpage created automatically when someone run `python setup.py build` but this target missed in the case of setuptools.
2) bdist_rpm uses `python setup.py sdist` command to create source tarball first, and this tarball contains only bzrlib-python sources, bzr script, README and setup.py script.
  a) I want to note that auto-generated C-extensions sources (from Pyrex code) is not included to sdist tarball, and header file (bzrlib/_dirstate_helper_c.h) too. Therefore bdist_rpm can't build C-extensions.
  b) sdist tarball misses generate_docs.py script and related tools/doc_generate package, therefore building manpage from scratch is impossible. Furthermore, setup.py try to import generate_docs unconditionally and raise ImportError as result.
3) main function setup() try to install manpage conditionally if target is not bdist_eggs. And because previous steps fails, this step fails as well.

To fix this issues we should:

1) Create valid MANIFEST.in to include all required non-python sources and files into sdist tarball
2) Ship bzr-release.tar,gz with manpage inside
3) Make import of generate_docs conditional and catch ImportError
4) Factor out manpage generation from custom build command to build_man subcommand of build to provide compatibility with setuptools and bdist_rpm

We should not put generate_docs.py and tools/doc_generate to sdist tarball, because it's not intended to install to python/site-packages libraries.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

That sounds like a good plan to me.

[Joe Julian (joe.julian)]

The attached MANIFEST.in works to build bdist_rpm with one caveat. There's a bug in distutils on distros that compress man pages: http://bugs.python.org/issue644744

After applying the bdist_rpm.py patch on the bug page to my python 2.6.2-2.fc12 and adding the attached MANIFEST.in to revno 4947, I was able to successfully build an RPM package.

[Per Johansson (per.j)]

Here's the rather convoluted command I use to build 2.0.x rpms on CentOS 5 (python 2.4). Not sure if it helps or not...

echo 'python setup.py install --root=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT --record=INSTALLED_FILES ; sed -i -e "s,man/man\([[:digit:]]\)/\(.\+\.[[:digit:]]\)$,man/man\1/\2.gz,g" INSTALLED_FILES' > rpm-install.sh ; env PYTHONPATH=`pwd` CPPFLAGS="-I`pwd`/bzrlib" python setup.py bdist_rpm --install-script=`pwd`/rpm-install.sh --doc-files=