This afternoon I was trying to use cpan2rpm to build some RPMs from CPAN. Except that the process was failing.

[alex@box FC8]$ cpan2rpm http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/D/DC/D
+CLINTON/Cache-Cache-1.05.tar.gz

-- cpan2rpm - Ver: 2.028 --
Upgrade check
Fetch: HTTP

-- module: http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/D/DC/DCLINTON/Cache-
+Cache-1.05.tar.gz --
Metadata retrieval
Tarball extraction: [/home/rand/alex/RPMS/SOURCES/Cache-Cache-1.05.tar
+.gz]
Generating spec file
SPEC: /home/box/alex/RPMS/SPECS/Cache-Cache.spec
Generating package
Signing package (pass phrase required)
error: You must set "%_gpg_name" in your macro file
Pass phrase check failed
RPM build failed [1] at /usr/bin/cpan2rpm line 1049.
-- Done --
[download]

A pass phrase is required? Hunh?

Google didn't help -- IRC was amusing, but also not helpful. Time to pull out the debugger.

OK, cpan2rpm is running the command

/usr/bin/rpmbuild -ba --clean --sign ../RPMS/SPECS/Cache-Cache.spec
[download]

I bet I just need to counteract that 'sign' argument. Let's check the rpmbuild man page .. hmm, refers us to rpm, OK, check that man page .. bingo!

So let's try it with the no-sign argument instead ..

[alex@box FC8]$ cpan2rpm --no-sign http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors
+/id/D/DC/DCLINTON/Cache-Cache-1.05.tar.gz

-- cpan2rpm - Ver: 2.028 --
Upgrade check
Fetch: HTTP
[...]
+ rm -rf Cache-Cache-1.05
+ exit 0
RPM: /home/box/alex/RPMS/RPMS/noarch/perl-Cache-Cache-1.05-1.noarch.rp
+m
SRPM: /home/box/alex/RPMS/SRPMS/perl-Cache-Cache-1.05-1.src.rpm
-- Done --
[download]

Nice -- without access to the cpan2rpm source, I'd have to poke and prod to try to guess what was going on. Instead, I can dig, find the problem, figure out a solution and keep moving. Another reason I love open source.