New Project: HOWTO Freely Obtain Our Source

Eric Christensen eric at christensenplace.us
Mon Jun 1 22:26:35 UTC 2009


On Mon, 2009-06-01 at 17:11 -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Eric Christensen wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 12:53, Mikkel L. Ellertson
> > <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> 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

But as someone pointed out, that source RPM isn't in an exceptionally
open format.  AND I know that everything Fedora produces isn't in RPM
format.

Eric

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