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Mock » Release Notes 1.4.20

A 'simple' chroot build environment manager for building RPMs.

Released on 2019-10-04.

Mock new features:

Container image for bootstrap

Previously we have some incompatibilities between host and build target. They were, in fact, small. Like using a different package manager. Some were big. Like, the introduction of Weak and Rich dependencies. For this reason, we introduced bootstrap. But then comes zstd payload. This is a new type of payload. And to install packages with this payload, you need rpm binary, which supports this payload. This is true for all current Fedoras. Unfortunately, neither RHEL 8 nor RHEL 7 supports this payload. So even bootstrap will not help you to build Fedora packages on RHEL 8.

We come up with a nice feature. Mock will not install bootstrap chroot itself. Instead, it will download the container image, extract the image, and use this extracted directory as a bootstrap chroot. And from this bootstrapped chroot install the final one.

Using this feature, any incompatible feature in either RPM or DNF can be used in the target chroot. Now or in future. And you will be able to install the final chroot. You do not even need to have RPM on a host. So this should work on any system. Even Debian based. The only requirement for this feature is Podman.

This feature is now disabled by default. You can enable it using:

config_opts['use_bootstrap_image'] = True

It can be enabled or disabled on the command line using --use-bootstrap-image or --no-bootstrap-image options.

Note however that also this is prerequisite:

config_opts['use_bootstrap_container'] = True # or --bootstrap-chroot option

To specify which image should be used for bootstrap container you can put in config:

config_opts['bootstrap_image'] = 'fedora:latest'

This is a general config. Each config has specified its own image specified. E.g. CentOS 7 has config_opts['bootstrap_image'] = 'centos:7' in config. So unless you use your own config, you can enable this feature, and the right image will be used.

There is one known issue:

Technically, you can use any container, as long as there is the required package manager (DNF or YUM). The rest of the needed packages will be installed by mock.

Mockchain removed

Mockchain has been removed. I wanted to keep it longer, but because of [RHBZ#1757388] I decided to remove it now. You should use mock --chain instead of mockchain. There is present simple wrapper /usr/bin/mockchain which calls mock --chain. Most of the mockchain parameters are still preserved for mock --chain.

New config option package_manager_max_attempts

When your infrastructure is not reliable and you see failing builds because of network issues, you can increase number of attemps to execute package manager’s action. This can be now tuned using:

config_opts['package_manager_max_attempts'] = 1
config_opts['package_manager_attempt_delay'] = 10

Bind mount local repos to bootstrap chroot

Previously when you have in your config something like:

config_opts['yum.conf'] = """
...
[myrepo]
baseurl=file:///srv/myrepo

then the path /srv/myrepo was not available inside of bootstrap container. The package manager was then unable to fetch those repositories.

This is now fixed and those directories are now automatically bind-mounted to bootstrap chroot.

This was actually the last known issue with bootstrap chroots. You may expect that in a future version of Mock, the bootstrap chroot will be enabled by default.

Mock-core-config bugfixes

Mock bugfixes

Following contributors contributed to this release:

Thank you.