Build Vs Rpmbuild

Hey. Right now I'm wondering if there are any real differences between build and rpmbuild in the final RPM. I think that I'm supposed to use build, as indicated by the SUSE Build Tutorial, but it wouldn't work. The %prep macro couldn't find the files (even though the error output was a real file). In frustration on trying many different things I just gave up and used rpmbuild, which worked.

Now, does that even do anything? If I somehow got build to work and repacked it in build, would the RPM be any different?

If the packages compiled and the rpm was built, then there should be no difference.

The way I view them, though others can correct me, is I generally use rpmbuild either when I'm modifying rpm source files to recompile, or I have a simple package to compile. Build will create a chroot environment and build your package in a clean environment, which is the proper route to go if you want your package to be usable on a generic openSUSE environment, but it's much more finicky (and rightly so).

I could be overly simplifying, or out of line, I must admit I don't really build packages that often, I generally use checkinstall since they're generally for my own use and it doesn't matter that they're specific to my environment.

If you really want to make your head spin, check out the openSUSE build service... You can leverage it to build packages for multiple distros, even locally on your own system. Cool stuff.

Cheers,
KV

Thanks. I'm using it for building packages of my own programs for distribution. I just wasn't entirely sure if all of the Suse macros would come through on rpmbuild. I was finding rpmbuild less touchy, and much, much faster.

It was still confusing how build was saying it couldn't find the file, though.

If you are looking to distribute files, you may really want to look into the build-service.

You can target your package at multiple versions, architectures and even different distros altogether. The tools are automated and will even automatically update your packages if any of your dependencies changes. All you need is an account on the openSUSE.org site, and you can have access to your own /home repo in the build service.

This greatly simplifies things for people you want to distribute your package to.

Cheers,
KV