RPM Packaging 101

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RPM Packaging 101

• Tanner Lovelace
• Triangle Linux Users Group
• 11/Jan/2003

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Outline

• Package Management Basics
• RPM Package Management Basics
• Creating Your Own RPM Packages
• Creating RPM Packages of Downloaded Programs
• Advanced RPM Packaging

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Package Management Basics

• Why use package management?
• OpenBSD base doesnt
• Most Linux systems do
• Keeps track of system packages
• Files
• Descriptions
• Checksums
• Other
• Allows easy upgrades and uninstalls

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RPM Package Management Basics

• Developed by Redhat
• Dominant distribution at the time was Slackware
• Slackware has packages, but not really a package
  management system
• RPM was a big advance over Slackware
• Current stable version is 4.1
• Most commonly used version today is 4.0.x
• We will be covering 4.0.x

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RPM Package Concepts

• Pristine Sources
• Most Linux software downloaded from the Internet
• Any distribution specific customizations should
  be kept separately in patches
• Makes it easier to handle new versions
• Reproducible Builds
• Building and packaging should be easy and
  reproducible
• Shell script automation

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Common RPM Installation Commands

• Installation
• rpm ihv ltpackage namegt
• Upgrade
• rpm Uhv ltpackage namegt
• Freshen
• rpm Fhv ltpackage namesgt
• Erase
• rpm e ltpackage namegt

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Other Common RPM Commands

• Query
• rpm qoption ltpackage namegt
• -qi Query Package Information
• -ql List Package Files
• -qf Query which package a file belongs to.
• --queryformat Construct Special Query
• --querytags List available tags
• -p Specify non-installed rpm package
• -a Query all installed files

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Other Common RPM Commands

• Verify
• rpm Voption ltpackage namegt
• Compare information about installed package files
  with information stored in rpm database and note
  any discrepencies.
• Compares size, MD5 sum, permissions, type, owner,
  and group of each package file
• Signature checking
• rpm -K--checksig ltpackage namegt
• Checks package gpg/pgp signature
• Conversion to cpio
• rpm2cpio cpio converts rpm files to cpio streams

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Setting up the RPM Build Environment

• NEVER BUILD RPMs AS ROOT!!!
• /.rpmmacros
• _topdir /path/to/rpm/build/env
• I typically use /RPM
• Optional temp directory
• _tmppath /path/to/tmp
• Create directories
• /RPM/BUILD
• /RPM/RPMS/ltarchgt
• /RPM/RPMS/noarch
• /RPM/SOURCES
• /RPM/SPECS
• /RPM/SRPMS

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Creating Your Own RPMs

• rpmbuild command
• rpmbuild ba build binary and source rpms
• rpmbuild bb build binary rpm
• rpmbuild bs build source rpm
• Before version 4, the rpm command was used
  instead of rpmbuild.
• Compatibility aliases in 4.0
• Aliases removed in 4.1 (Redhat 8.0)
• Need source files, patches (if any) and a spec
  file.
• Source and patch files go in SOURCES/
• Spec file goes in SPECS/

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RPM Spec Files

• Instructions for building and packaging an rpm.
• Building set of shell scripts
• Packaging General info, lists of files, etc.
• Divided into sections
• Headers (unlabeled section)
• description
• prep
• build
• install
• files
• Others

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Creating RPMs Examples

• See Pinky and the Brain Examples at
• http//home.fnal.gov/dawson/rpms/howto/index.html
  
• Sub package example
• Example of how to rpm-ify a package.
• Patching
• Conditional building

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References

• References will go here when presentation goes
  online..