Alien Deb to RPM convert fails with error: “Use of uninitialized value in split…” [FIXED]

Tuesday, June 7th, 2016

TL;DR: Run alien under the script tool.

I was trying to get my build server to build packages for one of my projects. One step involves converting a Debian package to a RPM by means of the Alien tool. Unfortunately it failed with the following error:

alien -r -g ansible-cmdb-9.99.deb
Warning: alien is not running as root!
Warning: Ownerships of files in the generated packages will probably be wrong.
Use of uninitialized value in split at /usr/share/perl5/Alien/Package/Deb.pm line 52.
no entry data.tar.gz in archive

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
Error executing "ar -p 'ansible-cmdb-9.99.deb' data.tar.gz | gzip -dc | tar tf -":  at /usr/share/perl5/Alien/Package.pm line 481.
make: *** [release_rpm] Error 2

The same process ran fine manually from the commandline, so I suspected something related with the controlling terminal. One often trick is to pretend to a script we actually have a working interactive TTY using the script tool. Here’s how that looks:

script -c "sh ansible-cmdb-tests.sh"

The job now runs fine:

alien -r -g ansible-cmdb-9.99.deb
Warning: alien is not running as root!
Warning: Ownerships of files in the generated packages will probably be wrong.
Directory ansible-cmdb-9.99 prepared.
sed -i '\:%dir "/":d' ansible-cmdb-9.99/ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.spec
sed -i '\:%dir "/usr/":d' ansible-cmdb-9.99/ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.spec
sed -i '\:%dir "/usr/share/":d' ansible-cmdb-9.99/ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.spec
sed -i '\:%dir "/usr/share/man/":d' ansible-cmdb-9.99/ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.spec
sed -i '\:%dir "/usr/share/man/man1/":d' ansible-cmdb-9.99/ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.spec
sed -i '\:%dir "/usr/lib/":d' ansible-cmdb-9.99/ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.spec
sed -i '\:%dir "/usr/bin/":d' ansible-cmdb-9.99/ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.spec
cd ansible-cmdb-9.99 && rpmbuild --buildroot='/home/builder/workspace/ansible-cmdb/ansible-cmdb-9.99/' -bb --target noarch 'ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.spec'
Building target platforms: noarch
Building for target noarch
Processing files: ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.noarch
Provides: ansible-cmdb = 9.99-2
Requires(rpmlib): rpmlib(CompressedFileNames) <= 3.0.4-1 rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix) <= 4.0-1
Requires: /usr/bin/env
Checking for unpackaged file(s): /usr/lib/rpm/check-files /home/builder/workspace/ansible-cmdb/ansible-cmdb-9.99
warning: Installed (but unpackaged) file(s) found:
   /ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.spec
Wrote: ../ansible-cmdb-9.99-2.noarch.rpm
Executing(%clean): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.3ssxv0
+ umask 022
+ cd /home/builder/rpmbuild/BUILD
+ /bin/rm -rf /home/builder/workspace/ansible-cmdb/ansible-cmdb-9.99
+ exit 0

Hope that helps someone out there.