Building RPMs

Creating a RPM in Fedora 12.

RPMs are the binary packages that Red Hat, Fedora, Suse and other distros use to install software. In most cases you can find a rpm packages somewhere on the web but for those rare occasions where you can only find the tar.gz source code than you can simply compile it using ./configure, make, make install. However, that isn't always the best way! It makes it harder to keep a rpm package list of all software installed if some apps are installed using 'make install' or what if you had a bunch of server racks that need to be running the same software and need the same updates? Wouldn't it be easier to use a rpm repository than to manually install on each computer?

So in a rpm package there are two files that are essential.
1) The actual software that needs installed or data that needs to be placed on the machine.
2) The SPEC file which holds the meta data of where everything goes.

I'm learning the in and outs of how to create/maintain rpm packages but I'll share with the web what I've learned so far.

So lets begin with the procedure required to creating a rpm package.

Needed packages

• rpm-build
• rpmdevtools
• rpmlint

yum install rpm-build rpmdevtools rpmlint

After the packages are downloaded and installed we can start creating/editing rpm packages.
First we create a directory to do all the work in.

rpmdev-setuptree

In that directory there are subdirectories such as SPECS, SOURCE and BUILD.
If your interested in editing a rpm than the easiest way would be to download a src.rpm.

yumdownloader --source packagename

This downloads a *.src.rpm which you can disassemble the rpm and see how they do it.

rpm -i packagename*.src.rpm

This installs the files in the packagename.src.rpm into ~/rpmbuild which you can find the tarball and the spec file for most packages.

TO BE CONTINUED...