Question

There are some more things that the Requires tag does not satisfy.
So i wrote a script to verify these things but where do I place them ?
And if not found then i want to quit installation prompting user to do the steps before attempting to install this rpm again.

writing exit 1 in %install tag fails to build the rpm using rpmbuild.
says %install has a bad exit code.

EDIT: let me provide you an example. What i initially wanted to test was is if Oracle Java 6 is present. If not then provide the path to Java6. If user fails to provide one … exit the RPM. Higher Java is not allowed and installation should not be successful without java. Cannot place it in Requires for a point if user does not want to install a java rpm package.

Hope i got my point through.

Answer 1

You can use the %pre section for this kind of task.

The %pre script executes just before the package is to be installed.
It is the rare package that requires anything to be done prior to
installation; none of the 350 packages that comprise Red Hat Linux
Linux 4.0 make use of it.

Some guide to get you started; the script content (not used in a %pre section) comes from jpackage-utils, you will find some other good examples of scripts there:

  %pre
  # try to find jvm from java command

  # try javac first, or we might get the location of the jre instead - djw
  java=`which javac 2>/dev/null || :`

  # if we don't have the jdk, then maybe we have the jre - djw
  if [ -z "$java" ] ; then
    java=`which java 2>/dev/null || :`
  fi

  if [ -n "$java" ] ; then
    while [ -h "$java" ] ; do
      java=`readlink $java 2>/dev/null`
    done
    return
  fi

  echo "Can't find java virtual machine, aborting."
  exit 1