Questions and Answers

I am having trouble working packer/have found a bug/have a feature request. What do I do?

Please email dmilstein at the domain users.sf.net with the information.

I am getting odd RPM build errors that complain about missing files in the gen_menus directory. What is wrong?

Packer puts the desktop and menu files that it generates in the gen_menus directory. If the gen_menus directory is not included in the source tarball, you will need to patch the package to include it. See documentation in the patching section of the packer wizard for information on how to do this.

I have a program foobar and I want to split it into the packages "foobar" and "foobar-data". I told packer that "foobar" was platform dependant and that "foobar-data" is platform independant. However, both packages are built as platform dependent packages when I build an RPM. Why is this?

This is a problem with RPM, not with packer. What the Fedora people are doing is either living with the platform independent data package if the data package is small or splitting the package tarball into two separate tarballs and having two separate specfiles (RPM package configuration files). I would recommend one of these approaches.

When I am building a package, packer is querying unrelated websites. Why?

This is perfectly normal. The autopackage package builder queries debian so that the user can be told what package is being checked for. The gentoo package builder queries debian to find out what the source package. Debian source packages usually have the same names as gentoo ebuilds.

How do I force packer to refresh its mappings of what file is in what package?

Delete all of the file beginning with "cache" in the packer directory.

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck couldn't chuck wood?

Decades of research by veterinary psychoanalysists has suggested that "a woodchuck would chuck all that it could chuck if a woodchuck couldn't chuck wood." This research, however, is thus far inconclusive.