Proposal: Building Packages under Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:

>On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 09:48 -0500, Tommy Reynolds wrote:
>  
>
>>Uttered Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazquez at ivazquez.net>, spake thus:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Attached is an outline for a guide to building packages under Fedora, in
>>>notecase format (available in Fedora Extras).
>>>      
>>>
>>Thank you for participating in the Docs project.  I would rather your
>>outline be an ordinary text file, HTML, OpenOffice, or PDF file and
>>be readible using anything from the basic Fedora distribution.
>>Nothing wrong with the Extras tools, but requiring folks to download
>>a non-standard package to read the outline seems to be a awkward start.
>>    
>>
>
>Okay, I went ahead and removed the NoteCase header and renamed the
>extension, and ran it through HTML tidy for good measure.
>
>  
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
>           Changelog
>
>2005.08.22: 0.0: Initial proposal (Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams)
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>           Introduction
>
>RPM (RPM Package Manager) is at the heart of Fedora Core. It's responsible for installing new software, as well as tracking files so that the same software can be uninstalled with a minimum of fuss. But RPM on its own doesn't actually do anything. It's up to the packager to specify how a package is built, as well as explaining what sort of files the package contains, and what other packages it relies upon for proper operation.
>      
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>           Structure of a package
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>Header
>This contains things such as the name, version, release, epoch, and architecture the package was built for, as well as what this package requires from other packages and what it provides to other packages.
>
>Files
>This contains all files, directories, symlinks, etc. contained in the package, as well as the size, permissions, ownership, and SELinux file context.
>
>Scripts
>This contains the scripts to be done on package install and uninstall, as well as the script done during a RPM verify.
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>           Modifying an existing package
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>(go through the various reasons why one would want to modify an existing package)
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>               Case Study: PHP
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>(modify the PHP package for adding <capability>)
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>
What kind of capabality are you documenting here?.   can you clarify that

>
>           Creating a new package
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>(reiterate RPM's file tracking capabilities vs. tarballs)
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>               Case Study: (TBD)
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>(go through building a new package for (TBD))
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>           Appendix: mock: Chroot Buildtool
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>(description of what a chroot is)
>(description of mock's command-line arguments)
>(description of mock's config file structure)
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>           Appendix: plague: Distributed Buildsystem
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>(description of what "distributed" means, as well as plague's cross-platform capabilities)
>(description of how to configure plague-builder and -server)
>(description of how to use plague-client)
>      
>
Rest of the guide looks good to get started with and better 
documentation about building packages and on plague is something thats 
very valuable.

regards
Rahul