如何在创建RPM软件包之前检查依赖关系？

Question

As the title suggests, how do I check without having to compile the package myself? In my case, I am going to build a package from somewhere else.

EDIT : Sorry for being unclear. What I mean by "build a package from somewhere else" is that I have to create a RPM package from source code, not by installing it. Without having to run ./configure, is there other way to check? In the RPM spec file, I have to put in BuildRequire, but how do it know? In SFML source for example, it doesn't have a configure file.

Answer 1

Good upstream developers usually include minimal required versions of packages they require to build (besides autotools & family of course). Other than that you can check configure.ac file. It requires basic knowledge of autotools, but if you can read it it will give you ideas what the package is checking for during configure without actually running it.

Another option is to have a minimal "buildroot" that will not have any special libraries installed by default. This way you can run configure, it will fail because of missing dependency so you can add it to your list. Then rinse & repeat until the package builds.

Last but not least, check if some distribution is already packaging said software and have a look at their dependencies. They will most likely be correct.

In any case, if the package is FLOSS, get in touch with authors and try to get them to list any specific dependencies in their documentation (README, or some other file distributed with sources).

Update 1: Note that different distributions can have different names for the same package. For example "apache-commons-daemon" in Fedora, "commons-daemon" in Debian world and "dev-java/commons-daemon" in Gentoo.

Answer 2

Use rpm -qp --requires . For example:

rpm -qp --requires  xchat-2.8.8-0.fc13.src.rpm

Shows:

perl  
perl(ExtUtils::Embed)  
python-devel  
openssl-devel  
pkgconfig  
tcl-devel  
GConf2-devel  
dbus-devel >= 0.60
dbus-glib-devel >= 0.60
glib2-devel >= 2.10.0
gtk2-devel >= 2.10.0
bison >= 1.35
gettext  
/bin/sed  
libtool  
libsexy-devel  
desktop-file-utils >= 0.10
rpmlib(FileDigests) <= 4.6.0-1
rpmlib(CompressedFileNames) <= 3.0.4-1