Building rpms with make

[Richard Siddall]

I'm trying to automate building a set of RPMs for a yum repository and
am kicking around the idea of using 'make'.

I'm having trouble figuring out the generic RPM build rule. I'm
guessing that having the version and release numbers, and the
architecture encoded in the RPM name is going to complicate building
such a rule. Presumably it's not as simple as:

%.rpm : %.spec %.tar
rpmbuild -ba $*

Could someone point me at a makefile that does this kind of repo
management (i.e. builds dozens of RPMs from dozens of spec files)?

Regards,

Richard Siddall

[Jeff Johnson]

Post by Richard Siddall
I'm trying to automate building a set of RPMs for a yum repository and
am kicking around the idea of using 'make'.
I'm having trouble figuring out the generic RPM build rule. I'm
guessing that having the version and release numbers, and the
architecture encoded in the RPM name is going to complicate building
%.rpm : %.spec %.tar
rpmbuild -ba $*
Could someone point me at a makefile that does this kind of repo
management (i.e. builds dozens of RPMs from dozens of spec files)?

The fundamental problem is that make rules use a timestamp
on files to determine "newer". That's great for .c.o rules, but
insufficient to handle other side-effects.

PLD has been using CVS for building rpm packages since <2000,

Connectiva had a nice SVN package building repository ~2003.

Red Hat exposed there CVS system in Fedora ~2004.

(all dates from memory) I'm sure there are other systems.

Silly to reinvent square wheels imho.

73 de Jeff

[Richard Siddall]

Post by Jeff Johnson
PLD has been using CVS for building rpm packages since <2000,
Connectiva had a nice SVN package building repository ~2003.
Red Hat exposed there CVS system in Fedora ~2004.

Jeff,

Thanks. koji looks promising. I haven't found out much about the PLD
or Connectiva build systems yet, but I'm still looking.

Regards,

Richard Siddall

[Tony Earnshaw]

Richard Siddall skrev, o> Jeff Johnson wrote:

[...]

Post by Richard Siddall

Post by Jeff Johnson
Red Hat exposed there CVS system in Fedora ~2004.

s/there/their/g but never mind, I prefer "its" anyway, being Dutch and
conforming strongly to Dutch grammar conventions (no plurals where
singular is implied, no collective plurals allowed) :)

Post by Richard Siddall
Thanks. koji looks promising. I haven't found out much about the PLD
or Connectiva build systems yet, but I'm still looking.

What on earth is wrong with Cervisia, standard Gnome CVS frontend, which
is what I use on all FCs?

You still have to gen up on CVS, notwithstanding, but once done,
Cervisia is still the front end you'll need to use in Gnome.

--Tonni

[Jeff Johnson]

Post by Tony Earnshaw
[...]

Post by Richard Siddall

Post by Jeff Johnson
Red Hat exposed there CVS system in Fedora ~2004.

s/there/their/g but never mind, I prefer "its" anyway, being Dutch and
conforming strongly to Dutch grammar conventions (no plurals where
singular is implied, no collective plurals allowed) :)

Yah, noted by me, but too late to change. Years of typing in an IRC window
has destroyed my grammar.

Post by Tony Earnshaw

Post by Richard Siddall
Thanks. koji looks promising. I haven't found out much about the PLD
or Connectiva build systems yet, but I'm still looking.

What on earth is wrong with Cervisia, standard Gnome CVS frontend, which
is what I use on all FCs?
You still have to gen up on CVS, notwithstanding, but once done,
Cervisia is still the front end you'll need to use in Gnome.

Lots and lots of square wheels around, I certainly don't claim
to have a complete list.

73 de Jeff

[Richard Siddall]

Post by Tony Earnshaw
What on earth is wrong with Cervisia, standard Gnome CVS frontend, which
is what I use on all FCs?
You still have to gen up on CVS, notwithstanding, but once done,
Cervisia is still the front end you'll need to use in Gnome.

Well, I never mentioned CVS, or SVN. Or Gnome. Or Fedora. I just want
to build a set of RPMs for various distros as painlessly and efficiently
as possible.

As it happens, I am interested in doing (almost) daily repo updates out
of CVS. Although that may change to SVN at some point.

I just took a look at the contents page for the Cervisia manual, and it
doesn't mention RPM at all.

The RPMs happen to be of a mod_perl/HTML::Mason application and all the
supporting Perl modules.

Regards,

Richard.

[Jeff Johnson]

Post by Richard Siddall
Well, I never mentioned CVS, or SVN. Or Gnome. Or Fedora. I just want
to build a set of RPMs for various distros as painlessly and efficiently
as possible.

Yes. Look closely at how RH uses make.common. There are other
peripheral issues like tagging and fetching that are reasonably solved
in RH's make.common. I think PLD uses a build script, not make.
Connectiva's old build system likely does something elegant, perhaps
with make. Too bad Connectiva is no more ...

Sorry for not saying that explicitly.

73 de Jeff

[Tony Earnshaw]

Post by Richard Siddall

Post by Tony Earnshaw
What on earth is wrong with Cervisia, standard Gnome CVS frontend,
which is what I use on all FCs?
You still have to gen up on CVS, notwithstanding, but once done,
Cervisia is still the front end you'll need to use in Gnome.

Well, I never mentioned CVS, or SVN. Or Gnome. Or Fedora. I just want
to build a set of RPMs for various distros as painlessly and efficiently
as possible.
As it happens, I am interested in doing (almost) daily repo updates out
of CVS. Although that may change to SVN at some point.
I just took a look at the contents page for the Cervisia manual, and it
doesn't mention RPM at all.

No, well it wouldn't, it's for version control. Like it keeps track of
changes to *source*. It can also do its stuff in $HOME/rpm/SPECS, for
example.

Post by Richard Siddall
The RPMs happen to be of a mod_perl/HTML::Mason application and all the
supporting Perl modules.

Well, this is where I give up on this thread ...

Best,

--Tonni

[Michael Jennings]

On Wednesday, 19 December 2007, at 11:51:15 (-0500),

Post by Richard Siddall
Well, I never mentioned CVS, or SVN. Or Gnome. Or Fedora. I just
want to build a set of RPMs for various distros as painlessly and
efficiently as possible.

You may be interested in Mezzanine:

http://beta.kainx.org/wiki/view/Mezzanine

It handles both CVS and SVN (the latter only in 1.9, though) and is
used as the sole build and package maintenance tool for the entire
Caos Linux distro (www.caoslinux.org). It was designed specifically
for doing package and distro maintenance under version control.

Post by Richard Siddall
I just took a look at the contents page for the Cervisia manual, and
it doesn't mention RPM at all.

That's because it's a front end to CVS, not a build tool.

Post by Richard Siddall
The RPMs happen to be of a mod_perl/HTML::Mason application and all
the supporting Perl modules.

Mezzanine contains perlpkg which makes it quite easy to package CPAN
modules.

Michael

[Richard Siddall]

Post by Michael Jennings
http://beta.kainx.org/wiki/view/Mezzanine
It handles both CVS and SVN (the latter only in 1.9, though) and is
used as the sole build and package maintenance tool for the entire
Caos Linux distro (www.caoslinux.org). It was designed specifically
for doing package and distro maintenance under version control.

Thanks. Is there a download link on that page? (The one on freshmeat
seems to work.)

Regards,

Richard.

[Michael Jennings]

On Wednesday, 19 December 2007, at 17:25:18 (+0100),

Post by Richard Siddall
Thanks. koji looks promising. I haven't found out much about the
PLD or Connectiva build systems yet, but I'm still looking.

What on earth is wrong with Cervisia, standard Gnome CVS frontend, which is
what I use on all FCs?

You mean other than the fact that he was asking for a build system
tool, not a GUI for CVS? :)

Michael