I use tsrpm a lot but find its output hard to interpret and it's invocation difficult to remember. Additionally I was always passing options to tsrpm like --verbose, so I wrote a wrapper script to automatically add that to any tsrpm command. I call the script tsrpmv, short for tsrpm verbose. It can be downloaded from http://www.timesys.com/blog_files/tsrpmv. Mark it executable and place it in /opt/timesys/bin.

tsrpmv is a wrapper for tsrpm that gives it many advantages, including:

• it remembers the architecture you last used, such as armv5l, on both a per-package and system-wide basis, so you don't have to specify the architecture every time on the command line
• it allows short forms of common commands, such as -b for build or -t for --target=
• if you are in a directory with a single spec file and invoke it with the -b (build) command, it will automatically append the spec file on the command line for you
• it hides useless tsrpm output such as:

  ++ setopt KSH_ARRAYS
  ++ :
  ++ _x=ehxB
  ++ set +x
  ++ unset _x

  while still giving the entire tsrpm output in a log file
• it pretty-prints and color codes most ./configure output, so that you get

  * checking for function prototypes    [ yes]
  * checking for stddef.h               [ yes]
  * checking for stdlib.h               [ yes]

• significant output is color-coded; yes and ok is in green, no and fail is in red, compiler and preprocessor warnings are in yellow, and errors are in red.
• if a cross-compilation fails inside ./configure, it automatically tries to show the relevant part of the config.log that gives the error
• if a cross-compilations fails inside ./configure due to a missing dependency, it automatically tries to cross-install that dependency and restart the cross-compilation, recursing for multiple levels of missing dependencies if needed
• it makes cross-installing easier by automatically finding the newest version of both standard and devel packages for the given architecture
• it shows a list of all packages that are cross-installed, formatted for quick importing into a python script
• it will save all compiled binary and source RPMs into a shared directory for use with other projects (for example, as dependencies to another package)
• it will extract all versions of a particular source package into target directories in preparation for cross-compiling
• it automatically times the output of tsrpm so that you can see how long compilation took
• it has variable levels of verbosity

In my next several blog entries I will explain how to use tsrpmv to make cross-compilation easier and more effective.