I was a little bit late to build latest rpm packages from spec files commited in the RPMforge svn tree. I had to deal with some external stuff and also fixing the fact that rpm-macros-rpmforge has to be installed in the chroot prior to try to build the prepared SRPM that my script/wrapper created. Now that it has been fixed and it's working (and newer rpmforge-release package to reflect all current arches), it was time to update the tree i'm building against/for . No problem for RHEL 4.8 PPC as it was ok but i updated the el5 tree to reflect RHEL 5.4 ppc. And then the problem : Mock dies completely on a bunch of errors but the first one seems obvious :

/usr/sbin/glibc_post_upgrade: While trying to execute /usr/sbin/iconvconfig.ppc child terminated abnormally
error: %post(glibc-2.5-42.ppc) scriptlet failed, exit status 115

Grr. Looking at  the`rpm -qp --changelog glibc-2.5-42.ppc.rpm` to see the differences among the glibc.ppc releases from RHEL 5.0 to 5.4 gave me some pointers :

build ppc and ppc64 base shared libraries with -mcpu=power4,
i.e. only support power4 and newer CPUs, *.a and *.o in
glibc-devel should still work on any powerpc CPU (#241003)

First thing : I always like when I consider reading such bugzilla report but can't read it. And the machine I  use to build the RPMforge PPC packages for RHEL PPC is quite old (a mac G4 from year 2K with a 7400, altivec supported cpu @ 400MHz). That one, of course, isn't at the required level compared to the real IBM PPC Power line .. :/

So that means that :

* either I need to find a Power4 (or above) machine to build the RPMforge ppc packages for RHEL5.4 ppc target (someone ?)

* or I need to recompile glibc.ppc with different flags, and all the dependencies ... which in the background means producing a CentOS 5 PPC (which is already a slowly but ongoing process) , but I already hear my small machine screaming at me "Welcome to the Hell of dependencies [TM]" ... ;-)