[fedora-india] Packaging RPM presentation

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 05/10/2009 06:40 PM, Shakthi Kannan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have tried to make a simple presentation on packaging RPM. Can you
> please go through the following, and let me know if I have missed
> something, or there is anything that I overlooked (that needs
> changes), or something that will be good to include in the following?
> http://shakthimaan.com/downloads/glv/presentations/packaging-red-hot-paneer-butter-masala.pdf
> 
> The sources are available at:
> http://shakthimaan.com/downloads/glv/presentations/packaging-red-hot-paneer-butter-masala.tar.gz

Pretty good. Just a few notes:

You might want to look at

www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2008/downloads/pdf/Wednesday_130pm_Tom_Callaway_OSS.pdf

License field is shortened and includes the version number, atleast in
the Fedora Packaging guidelines ex: GPLv2+

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:LicensingGuidelines

You shouldn't need to pass --clean explicitly. Instead the spec file
should have a clean section

Ex:

---

%clean
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT

---

rpmls (part of rpmdevtools) can list packages without having to extract
them first with rpm2cpio directly.

Also, I prefer yum install <path/to/rpm> --nogpgcheck install of using
rpm directly just in case that the rpm has additional dependencies.

Also, I recommend users always create a separate user just for building
packages and then use mock (recommended) or alternatively rpmbuild just
as a safety measure. Also koji (the build system used by Fedora) has a
client which can be used for creating scratch builds.  If someone is
interested in Fedora specifically, they can get started with

# yum install fedora-packager (meta package that pulls in the usual
required tools)

Rahul