Chris Tyler - Fedora Linux

%vendor Chris Tyler

%_home /home/chris

%_topdir /home/chris/rpm

%_tmppath /home/chris/rpm/tmp

%_builddir /home/chris/rpm/tmp

%_rpmtopdir /home/chris/rpm/%{name}

%_sourcedir %{_rpmtopdir}

%_specdir %{_rpmtopdir}

%_rpmdir /home/chris/rpm/RPMS

%_srcrpmdir /home/chris/rpm/RPMS

%_rpmfilename %%{NAME}-%%{VERSION}-%%{RELEASE}.%%{ARCH}.rpm

%_signature gpg

%_gpg_path /home/chris/.gnupg

%_gpgbin /usr/bin/gpg

%_gpg_name Chris Tyler

To test that this file has been saved in the correct location and is being correctly interpreted by rpm , execute rpm --eval followed by the name of one of the macros:

$ rpm --eval "%_gpg_name"

Chris Tyler

$ rpm --eval "%_srcrpmdir"

/home/chris/rpm/RPMS

Both versions of this file use the directory ~/rpm to hold packages being built. Within this directory, there will be:

 A directory for each package being built, named after that package.

 A directory named tmp , for temporary files created during the building process.

 A directory named RPMS , to hold the final RPM packages.

You'll need to create these directories:

$ mkdir -p ~/rpm/RPMS ~/rpm/tmp

The fedora-rpmdevtools package provides the fedora-buildrpmtree command, which prepares a suitable directory structure within your home directory and creates a very basic .rpmmacros file. If you use this command, your RPMs will be built within the directory ~/rpmbuild .

The RPM building process is controlled by a spec file . Creating a good spec file is both a science and an art.

To start, create a new directory within ~/rpm to hold your source tarball and the spec file. In this example, I'm going to package up the game Critical Mass (also called critter ), available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/criticalmass . I'll name the directory after the package:

$ mkdir ~/rpm/ CriticalMass

I'll place the source tarball CriticalMass-1.0.0.tar.bz2 in this directory. The spec file will also be named after the package: CriticalMass.spec .

The first part of any spec file is called the preamble and contains the fields, or tags, outlined in Table 5-7 . Each tag is placed on a line by itself, followed by a colon and the value for that tag.

Table 5-7. Basic preamble tags in a spec file

This is the initial information for the Critical Mass spec file:

Name: CriticalMass

Version: 1.0.0

Release: 1

Group: Amusements/Games

Summary: An arcade-style shoot-em-up game.

License: GPL

Source0: CriticalMass-1.0.0.tar.bz2

URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/criticalmass

BuildRoot: %{_tmppath}/%{name}-root

One more tag must be defined %description but this tag does not take the name:value form. Instead, a description of the package follows on the lines after the tag:

%description

CriticalMass is an old-style arcade-style shoot-em-up game with modern graphics and sound.

The description text will be automatically wrapped and formatted to fit available space when it is displayed. To include preformatted text, leave a space at the start of each preformatted line.

After this initial information are seven sections, each identified by a section name:

%prep

Commands used to prepare the package for building.

%build

Commands used to build the package from the source (such as make ).

%install

Commands to install the software (such as make install ).

%check

Commands to test whether the software built correctly ( make test ). Optional; many packages do not include this section.

%clean

Commands to remove temporary files after a build.

%files

A list of the files that are to be included in the package.

%changelog

A history of package versions.

The %prep section might include all of the commands that would normally be used to prepare the package:

%prep

tar xvjf CriticalMass-1.0.0.tar.bz2

cd CriticalMass-1.0.0

However, since most open source packages use some simple variation of the same steps, Fedora's standard RPM setup includes a macro script to do this work for you. It's named %setup ; to use it, specify it as the only step in the %prep section of the spec file:

%prep

%setup

Similarly, the %build stage can use the predefined %configure macro to run ./configure before make is run:

%build

%configure

make %{_smp_mflags}

The %{_smp_mflags} macro, used as an argument to make , will contain the options required to configure the build process for a symmetric multiprocessor system with multiple CPUs if the package is being built on an SMP system. (For many applications, this will make no difference).

The %install section installs the filesnot into the final destination directories, but into the appropriate directories under the BuildRoot . In this case, since we've defined the BuildRoot as ~rpm/tmp/CriticalMass-root/ , files that would normally be installed into /usr/bin will be installed into ~rpm/tmp/CriticalMass-root/usr/bin .