rpmbuild and PyInstaller

I recently ran into an issue using rpmbuild to package PyInstaller binaries. Running a packaged executable yielded the following:

Cannot open self /path/to/executable or /path/to/executable.pkg

While this particular output could be caused by a few things, after using debug=True in the PyInstaller spec file to make a debug binary, I tracked the error down to the pyi_arch_check_cookie function.

What’s happening here is that PyInstaller is doing a consistency check of sorts on the package internals. I didn’t make the connection to rpmbuild, which made the troubleshooting session a little longer than it needed to be.

As part of the default RPM building process any binary files are stripped of debug symbols. This is to say that any variable or function names that remain in binaries are removed and placed into a separate package. The result is smaller binaries with the option of loading the symbols at a later time for troubleshooting. While this would be desirable for a typical package, it breaks the integrity checks that PyInstaller is performing.

The solution is to disable stripping for the rpmbuild operation, by adding some definitions to the rpm spec file.¹²

%define __os_install_post %{nil}
%define debug_package %{nil}

Rebuild your package and give it another go.