Linux at DUKE Nosrc-RPM project.

[Damian Christey]

Greetings and thanks for your great work,

I have also been packaging proprietary software (Matlab to start with)
to run on Fedora for our Math Department and am interested in
collaborating with others who are doing similar things.

There are a few things I did slightly differently.
1. I build one monolithic Matlab package rather than packaging each
toolkit separately.  Not sure if this is good or bad, I was just trying
to make building packages as simple as possible.
2. I used the "expect" program to make a script that automates the
Matlab installer. This adds a build dependency on expect >= 5.0, which
is in the base Fedora distribution as well as previous Redhat versions
back to 6.0, but may not be installed by default.  
3. I tried to make the whole process as generic as possible, so it could
be easily modified to build packages for other proprietary software.

I've made a nosrc rpm available here:
http://www.math.wvu.edu/~damian/fedora/nosrc-rpm/matlab-7.0.1-2.nosrc.rpm for testing purposes.

To build packages:
1. Download the Matlab installer, all the toolboxes you want to package,
and your license.dat file from the Mathworks' website.
2. Place all of the downloaded files in a folder named "matlab" in your
build directory, for example: /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/matlab/
3. Make sure expect is installed:
# rpm -q expect
if not:
# yum install expect
4. Build it!
# rpmbuild --rebuild matlab-7.0.1-2.src.rpm

-- 
Damian Christey <damian at math.wvu.edu>
System Administration, WVU Department of Mathematics