New Project: HOWTO Freely Obtain Our Source

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, Jun 01, 2009 at 06:32:10PM -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Eric Christensen wrote:
> > 
> > But as someone pointed out, that source RPM isn't in an exceptionally
> > open format.  AND I know that everything Fedora produces isn't in RPM
> > format.
> > 
> > Eric
> > 
> RPM isn't an open format as compared to what? It isn't a simple
> format, but it is about as open as you can get. It is used by
> multiple distributions, and is available for other systems besides
> Linux. It is easy to access with the proper tools. For that matter,
> you can install a source RPM just like you would install a binary
> RPM. It will put the files in the default build tree for the user
> doing the installation. You do not have to be root to install a
> source RPM.

I think we should differentiate "open" in the sense of "documented,
transparently accessible by any tool" (which the RPM format is) from
"easy to understand for n00bs." (which it's not).

However, you can open an RPM with any number of easy tools, and it's
easy to document the fastest way to get RPM source:

1.  Install yum-utils and rpm-build packages, or better yet the
"Fedora Packager" group to make things easy.
2.  Run 'yumdownloader --source <package_name>'.[1]
3.  Run 'rpm -ivh <filename.src.rpm'.
4.  Run 'rpmbuild -bp ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/<package>.spec' to build the
source from the archive, applying patches and so forth.
5.  Browse in ~/rpmbuild/BUILD/<package>-<version> to heart's desire.

> Now, as far as Fedora producing something that is not an RPM, I
> would like to see an example of that. Some things are generated "on
> the fly" by the scripts included in the RPM, but there is nothing
> stopping you from looking at the scripts - even is a binary RPM.

I think Eric was referring to our many hosted projects,
infrastructure, websites, artwork, and so forth, where source is
stored in some sort of source code control, but RPM packages are
indeed not produced or published.

Fedora produces a lot more than just the software packaged for your
distribution!

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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