[clue-talk] Fwd: From Red Hat to LUGs: greetings, updates, requests

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 16:07:24 -0500
Ed Hill wrote:

> Do you mean:
>  - "create RPMs just for your own systems", or
>  - "create RPMs that will become part of Fedora" ?
>
> For the former, there are a number of ways including even the mostly
> automated (some would say very-cheap-and-dirty) "checkinstall" method:
> 
>   http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/index.php
> 
> to help you quickly create RPMs for your own purposes.

Both.

In the 1st scenario, I want to keep my own system well organized, and have
a means to easily uninstall things I've built from source. Various reasons
for doing this, for example if the available RPM isn't built the way you
want it. The RPM I found for Sylpheed didn't have GPG enabled. Some stuff
doesn't have RPMs. I used to just build from source, and them "make
install". The result was that I had stuff in locations other than "Red Hat
standard", which can create problems if, for example, I decided to switch
to an available RPM later.

I've used chkinstall in the past. When it works, it works, but it doesn't
always work. And, IIRC (haven't used it for a while) it produces RPMS
which  install (if building from a tarball) to locations specified in the
packages config file (or makefile?), e.g. using /usr/local/bin instead of
/usr/bin, which isn't necessarily bad, unless you later switch to a
supplied package. IOW, it can suffer from the same problems as building
from source.

Obviously, the answers are to be cognizant and careful with how you use
things such as chkinstall.

And, really, even if you're planning on building only for your own local
installs, it actually makes some sense to build as if doing to for public
distribution, because that puts you in the mindset of paying attention to
dependency checking, etc., which is something you probably want to to for
your own system anyways. The last thing you want to do (and I don't know
how likely this is, because I'm no expert on RPM) is break your own RPM
database. And, if you're building from source, you want what you install
to be properly configured, so that it can satisfy (where appropriate)
dependencies for other packages you might install.

> And even if you don't want to join in the Extras project, their
> documentation still provides lots of good advice on how to create
> high-quality and maintainable RPMs:
> 
>   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines
>   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/ReviewGuidelines

Thanks for the links, Ed. It's been a while since I looked from RPM docs.
I'll check 'em out.

jed
-- 
http://s88369986.onlinehome.us/freedomsight/
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... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
facilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier
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