How to use the same CentOS to build RPMs for different versions?

Question

I'm trying to use the same CentOS instance to get me to build packages for both versions 5 and 6. Until now everything was working OK, but I think an update in the building instance (6) now includes some dependencies that seems they're not available in version 5:

error: Failed dependencies: rpmlib(FileDigests) <= 4.6.0-1 is needed by pulse-13.1.0-181013.noarch rpmlib(PayloadIsXz) <= 5.2-1 is needed by pulse-13.1.0-181013.noarch

My question: is there any way of doing this? Is this even suppose to work i.e. building RPM for different target versions?

Answer 1

There are two ways whose performance is better than normal VM:

• Make CentOS 5 or 6 chroot environment and build RPM inside it.
• Configure LXC and builde RPM inside it, see also http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/LXC-on-CentOS6 and http://whistl.com/index.php/blog/2011/08/28/linux-containers-under-centos-6

Answer 2

you can try crosstool-ng. OSDev Wiki page has a lot of information about cross compilation.