Re: New Project: HOWTO Freely Obtain Our Source

[Mikkel]

Eric Christensen wrote:
>  On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 12:53, Mikkel L. Ellertson
>  <mikkel(a)infinity-ltd.com&gt; wrote:
> > I guess I don't see the problem - the source RPMs are normally
> > available from the same mirrors as the binary RPMs. It is just a
> > matter of enabling the source repo (It is in the config, just
> > disabled.) and selecting the source RPM you want. This way, you get
> > the "virgin source" plus the patches that Fedora is using. The .spec
> > file normally has a pointer to the upstream web site as well, just
> > in case it isn't in the source package.
>  
>  And that is one way of obtaining a version of the source.  But how did
>  you know you could get the source from the repos?  Is that were ALL
>  the source files?
>   
I don't really remember where the information came from any more. I
do know that a full mirror will have a SRPMS directory with the
source RPMs in it.

In order to have a binary RPM, you first need a source RPM. There
may be some exceptions in some of the extra repo's, but all the
"official" Fedora RPMs need to have a source RPM that they were
built from. It does get a bit complicated in that one source RPM may
generate more then one binary RPM. Also, some binary RPMs are not
really binaries, but things like header files needed for building
other programs.

By the specifications, the source RPM has to contain the source code
and packages to build the RPM. It can, and usually will, have
dependencies on other packages. These are normally the same
dependencies needed to build the package yourself from a tar file.

One other thing - if you look at the headers of a binary RPM, you
will usually find the URL of the upstream home site of the package.
(The headers have all kinds of interesting information.)

I believe most of this is covered in teh RPM documentation...

Mike
-- 
The best book on programming for the layman is "alice in wonderland";
but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.