Aristedes Maniatis wrote:

>> The environment is OSX and rpm is built using the scripts and  
>> patches found here:
>
> http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/dports/ 
> sysutils/rpm50
>
>
> rpmbuild is called from an ant script, but I've not come across port 
> (1) before so I'm not sure what that is (and you'd imagine that  
> Googling for 'port' doesn't help me :-)
>
> I'll reproduce the entire SPEC for you inline. It is pretty simple,  
> although I'm not sure if we are doing the right thing. It is meant  
> to be a binary only rpm since we the ant script has already built  
> the appropriate jars. Really it is very simple: put startup script  
> in the right place, put jar in the right place and create a couple  
> of folders. rpm is overkill but I thought it might be a convenient  
> packaging tool. It really is quite complicated to do simple things  
> though (compared to what I know well which is the FreeBSD ports/ 
> packaging system). But that might be my inexperience with it and  
> the lack of documentation about use cases which aren't ./configure  
> && make style installs.
>
> The ant target used is fairly understandable even if you haven't  
> used ant much:
>
> <rpm rpmBuildCommand="/opt/local/bin/rpmbuild"  
> specFile="onCourseServer.spec" topDir="${distribution.dir}/rpm"  
> failOnError="true" command="-bb"/>

The problem is with how the Ant Rpm task calls rpmbuild:

http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/ant/core/trunk/src/main/org/apache/tools/ 
ant/taskdefs/optional/Rpm.java?revision=565095&view=markup

         if (topDir != null) {
             toExecute.createArgument().setValue("--define");
             toExecute.createArgument().setValue("_topdir" + topDir);
         }

There is a space (" ") missing between the name and the value,
which causes later versions of RPM to translate all '-' to '_'.
(it now converts all dashes in the macro _names_ to underscores,
but will leave values alone - as long as they are separated OK)

So changing "_topdir" to "_topdir " above, should fix it...

--anders