creating own RPMs

[David Hláčik]

Hello guys,

I will be creating rpm packages for software company i work for. I
have built a lot of rpm packages by myself, so I have experience with
that.
But my question is :
How to make this process more comfortable and improve efficiency.

So far i was creating packages by using rpmdevtools and rpmbuild itself.
I've read about mock , which is chrooted environment for building
SRPMs . But does this mock can be applied on spec files? Do i need to
prepare srpm package before i can work with mock? If so, this will not
help me much.

How should i proceed with creation of srpms besides of rpm utils and
rpmbuild build only source.

Thanks in advance,

David

[Armin]

On Wednesday 11 March 2009 20:09:57 David Hláčik wrote:
> Hello guys,
>
> I will be creating rpm packages for software company i work for. I
> have built a lot of rpm packages by myself, so I have experience with
> that.
> But my question is :
> How to make this process more comfortable and improve efficiency.
>
> So far i was creating packages by using rpmdevtools and rpmbuild itself.
> I've read about mock , which is chrooted environment for building
> SRPMs . But does this mock can be applied on spec files? Do i need to
> prepare srpm package before i can work with mock? If so, this will not
> help me much.
>
> How should i proceed with creation of srpms besides of rpm utils and
> rpmbuild build only source.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> David

I would write a shell script to automate some of the building and updating.

[Todd Zullinger]

David Hláčik wrote:
> I will be creating rpm packages for software company i work for. I
> have built a lot of rpm packages by myself, so I have experience
> with that.  But my question is : How to make this process more
> comfortable and improve efficiency.
>
> So far i was creating packages by using rpmdevtools and rpmbuild
> itself.  I've read about mock , which is chrooted environment for
> building SRPMs . But does this mock can be applied on spec files? Do
> i need to prepare srpm package before i can work with mock? If so,
> this will not help me much.

Yes, you need to feed mock an srpm.  But that's easy enough.

Mock is useful in ensuring that you have reproducible builds.  Using
rpmbuild you may not notice needed dependencies or might pick up
unwanted deps.  Plus, using mock you can create packages for different
versions of Fedora and RHEL/CentOS.

If you need to build a lot of packages, you could look into using
koji, which helps coordinate mock builders and can create srpms to
feed mock from various version control systems.

[Gordon Messmer]

David Hláčik wrote:
> So far i was creating packages by using rpmdevtools and rpmbuild itself.
> I've read about mock , which is chrooted environment for building
> SRPMs . But does this mock can be applied on spec files? Do i need to
> prepare srpm package before i can work with mock? If so, this will not
> help me much.

I'm curious why that would be.  What makes building src.rpm packages 
difficult enough that mock wouldn't be any further help?  Normally you 
can just "rpmbuild -bs --nodeps package.spec" to build a src.rpm, and 
then use mock to set up the chroot directory for different releases and 
rebuild the package.