[packagers] becoming a packager

[Dag Wieers]

On Fri, 16 Nov 2007, J Robinson wrote:

> I'm interested in becoming a packager, but I'm pretty new to building RPMs.
>
> How do I set up to become a rpmforge packager? I've rebuilt a few rpms
> from src.rpms using rpmbuild but that's about it-- I want to
> transition away from using scripts to install things from source
> towards building custom RPMs and this seems like a good way to go.
>
> I noticed that the packager's info page is pretty minimal.... any tips
> on how to get started? I'm looking at the archives now...

First of all you need to know that RPMforge is in a transitional phase.
The new project is called rpmrepo and is a merge of existing repositories
(like atrpms, rpmforge, centos extras and more) but it is only slowly
progressing with the infrastructure.

So in the meantime RPMforge is chewing on as before, but the website was
never really maintained (and is mostly outdated). If you consider joining
rpmrepo, your work with RPMforge is not lost, it will move to rpmrepo.

Build RPM packages in itself is pretty straightforward, the hard part is
knowing what works and what doesn't (that is the experience). My aim with
RPMforge was to focus on SPEC file simplicity and consistency.

This means that our SPEC files have a well-defined order and structure and
we modify SPEC files to be consistent with that. I am writing a document
that explains all these items, but most of the SPEC files in the
repository (and especially the recently updated ones) comply to these
(mostly) unwritten rules.

The strict structure is there to make it easier to maintain SPEC files in
bulk which sometimes is necessary.

So once you have created a SPEC file (see subversion for 4000+ examples),
you can create a package from it with the rpmbuild command, eg:

	rpmbuild -bb something.spec

That is the basics. :) Any specific questions yet ?

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]