My version of docker (1.8.3) have a different formating for 'docker version'
that broke the build script. We make the version matching more generic in to
work with both version.
There are make targets for building mercurial packages for various
distributions using docker. One of the preparation steps before building is to
create inside the docker image a user with the same uid/gid as the current user
on the host system, so that the resulting files have appropriate
ownership/permissions.
It's possible to run `make docker-<distro>` as a user with uid or gid that is
already present in a vanilla docker container of that distibution. For example,
issue4657 is about failing to build fedora packages as a user with uid=999 and
gid=999 because these ids are already used in fedora, and groupadd fails.
useradd would fail too, if the flow ever got to it (and there was a user with
such uid already).
A straightforward (maybe too much) way to fix this is to allow non-unique uid
and gid for the new user and group that get created inside the image. I'm not
sure of the implications of this, but marmoute encouraged me to try and send
this patch for stable.
This allows me to build rpm packages using boot2docker on my Mac. It's
probably a very fragile hack, but it seems to work well enough for now
that I felt it was worth sharing.
I'm about to start interacting with docker for Debian packaging too,
so it's time to centralize this so that any bugfixes I figure out
apply to both codepaths.
