Troubleshooting

The most common reason for a packaging failing to build is that some file in the package is installed with a hard-coded path of /usr rather than respecting the macros such as %{_prefix}, %{_libdir}, etc. This might require adjustment of the spec file, passing additional variables into the make command, or in rare cases, patching the Makefiles.

If you hit such a problem, you can temporarily dnf install flatpak-rpm-macros, try rebuilding the package with fedpkg local, fix problems, then uninstall flatpak-rpm-macros. Leaving flatpak-rpm-macros installed will cause all packages you build locally to be built with _prefix=/app and not work.

Currently, the RPM scripts that compress manual pages don’t compress manual pages in /app. So if an RPM has

It will fail to build in a Flatpak module. The recommendation in the Fedora packaging guidelines is to have:

which is more robust against future changes to the RPM scripts to use different compression.

During installation of packages to build a Flatpak container, the set of packages is restricted to packages in the runtime and packages built in your module. Other packages in Fedora will be ignored. If you see a message about missing dependencies that you know are in Fedora, this is because they are being ignored because of this restriction.

fedmod rpm2flatpak should have added all necessary dependencies not in the runtime to your module. However, subsequent packaging changes might require updates to your module.

You could also see failures if a package in the runtime grew a new dependency.and the runtime hasn’t been updated. If the package with the dependency causing the dnf failure isn’t part of your module, please bug an issue against flatpak-runtime.

At the moment, operations that are done via global Fedora file triggers, such as running glib-compile-schemas or gtk-update-icon-cache do not happen properly with a prefix of /app. It’s necessary to manually do these actions out of the cleanup-commands section of container.yaml. For example: