Guide on RPM building released

Dax Kelson dax at gurulabs.com
Wed Apr 13 19:57:53 UTC 2005


We have released a section of our courseware under a Creative Commons
license that has very comprehensive coverage of building RPMs.

It has treatment of the whole spectrum of issues including making proper
patches, the freedesktop.org menu specification, and ancillary files
like logrotate.d files, cron.*/ files, SysV init files along with
chkconfig, etc.

One unique thing about the guide is that it is not just a reference as
it includes a very detailed (48 page) lab exercise that walks a would be
packager through several real world scenarios including:

* Setting up a build environment
* Re-building an existing src.rpm
* Updating a src.rpm with newer software release (and handling merged
upstream patches)
* Creating a spec file from scratch to package an application
* Extending a spec file to break a single application into multiple
logical packages
* Setting up GnuPG and signing your packages

The lab exercise has been validated and tested to "just work as written"
on the following distributions:

Fedora Core 3
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
SUSE Linux Professional 9.2
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9

It will likely work, possibly with small modifications, on other RPM
based distributions as well.

The guide can be found under the "Goodies" section of our website here:

http://www.gurulabs.com/goodies/guru+guides.php

I'm excited to make this release and hope it is useful addition to the
available RPM documentation and helps increase the amount of quality
packagers and packages.

Dax Kelson
Guru Labs




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