Re: Documentation about how to create a patch rpm package

[James Olin Oden <joden malachi lee k12 nc us>]

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Klaus Schrod wrote:

> Hello everybody,
> 
> I need to create a patch rpm package for a bigger rpm packege. I want to 
> change only one or two files in this big package and for several reasons 
> I am not able to distribute a new version of the big package.
> 
> Does anybody know a documentation how to create patch rpms?
>
Hi Klaus,

RPM does not support patching perse.  It supports upgrading existing
packages.  The end result of upgrading a package gives you the same thing
as "patch" rpm would except that you do have redistribute the entire rpm.
That being said, you can do a couple of things:

	1) You could create an rpm with just the files that have changed,
	   but this would have to have a different name than the original 
	   package, and would have to be installed with --force (or
	   --nodeps, or both).  So you would end with a package named 
	   something like appx-patch.
	2) You could not use rpm to deliver the files, and simply have 	
	   them delivered via a tarball or something.  As far as building
	   you could still build the entire new rpm, but use rpm2cpio to 
 	   extract the deliverable files from the full rpm.

Either way you arre going to end up with a situation where if your run
rpm -V against the original package, it would not pass on the files you 
added.

If you don't mind my asking, why can't you redistribute a new rpm?

Cheers...james

P.S. This has been discussed a lot in the recent past, so looking at this 
month and last months archive of the list should probably give you some
more info.