a look at my spec file for Webmin

Jos Vos jos at xos.nl
Thu Jun 7 19:18:30 UTC 2007


On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 12:10:35PM -0500, Scott Berry wrote:

> This is from a srpm from www.webmin.com.  Yes it has worked  on Fedora 6.
> The reason I don't follow guidelines is there is no
>  Examples. I tried understanding them but they are a little too in depth for
> beginning users.  The guidelines I do use are found here:
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/drafts/rpm-guide-en/ch11s02.html 
> The guidelines need to be geared more towards a beginner if you want more
> packagers.

Although docs can always be better, you shouldn't necessarily assume
that docs (alone) can make you a good packager starting as an
unexperienced "beginner", as you call yourself.

As someone giving RPM packaging talks and courses, I think packaging
is not something you learn from a set of guidelines alone.  The most
important thing, besides reading theory, is browsing through existing
spec files.  Fedora has more than 4200 of them (not all are of the
same quality, b.t.w.).  From those examples, you can easily learn how
packages deal with init scripts, for example.

My advice:

-  Start reading <http://docs.fedoraproject.org/drafts/rpm-guide-en/>.

-  Browse through some spec files, e.g. by going to the Fedora directory
   with 4200+ src.rpm's and get all the spec files like this:

   mkdir /tmp/specs
   for f in *.src.rpm; do
	rpm2cpio $f | (cd /tmp/specs; cpio -iuvdm '*.spec')
   done

-  Start experimenting and ask questions on a mailing list.

As others already pointed out, the example you gave has some really
bad parts in it and is certainly not an example of a good spec file.

-- 
--    Jos Vos <jos at xos.nl>
--    X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV   |   Phone: +31 20 6938364
--    Amsterdam, The Netherlands        |     Fax: +31 20 6948204




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