Bad Exit Status from rpmbuild on Mac OSX - macos

Question

I'm working on packaging up some work into an rpm. I am doing this on Mac OSX after brew installing rpm. I have a basic .spec file, but I am getting an error and have been unable to diagnose it:
$ rpmbuild -ba myapp.spec
Executing(%prep): %{__spec_prep_cmd} /usr/local/Cellar/rpm/5.4.10/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.14478
error: Bad exit status from /usr/local/Cellar/rpm/5.4.10/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.14478 (%prep)
RPM build errors:
Bad exit status from /usr/local/Cellar/rpm/5.4.10/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.14478 (%prep)
The spec files is as follows:
Name: myapp
Version: 0.1.0
Release: 1
Summary: Web service to do stuff
URL: http://myapp.com
BuildRoot: %{_tmppath}/myapp-build-root
%description
My app
%prep
%build
%install
%pre
%preun
%postun
%clean
%files
%defattr(-,www-data,www-data,-)
%doc
This is my first time building an rpm, what am I doing wrong, and how can I fix this. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I ran into the same issue today. For no obvious reason the %prep macro fails, even without any content.
Running your spec on my Ubuntu box seems to work just fine after adding those two values:
License: yourLicense
Group: yourGroup
I have reason to believe, that rpm didn't get installed correctly on my box via homebrew. I think I aborted the process at some point, then forgot about it over lunch, but rpmbuild was available to use from within my script and I ran into the issue above.
I will try doing a clean install of the rpm formula in verbose mode to see whether my assumption is correct.
Update:
I've installed rpm successfully, but it took an awful long time:
/usr/local/Cellar/rpm/5.4.10: 187 files, 9.7M, built in 92.4 minutes
Nevertheless, it keeps on failing with the same error
rpmbuild -ba so.spec
Executing(%prep): %{__spec_prep_cmd} /usr/local/Cellar/rpm/5.4.10/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.69701
error: Bad exit status from /usr/local/Cellar/rpm/5.4.10/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.69701 (%prep)
With the content of /usr/local/Cellar/rpm/5.4.10/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.69701 saying:
%{__spec_prep_template}%{__spec_prep_post}