Who maintains RPM? [LWN.net]

Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 22, 2006 22:44 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
Parent article: Who maintains RPM?

As a developer, I find RPM to be a shockingly evil piece of software. There is precious little up-to-date documentation for creating .spec files, and there are hundreds of hidden and undocumented hacks, macros and tweaks. I don't know anyone who has written a .spec file from scratch. Everyone I know starts with an existing .spec as and example and then modifies it.

We also make .debs of our software, and while building .debs is also pretty arcane, at least there's lots of documentation and it's mostly up-to-date.

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Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 22, 2006 22:50 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (1 responses)

Tsk David.

I wrote a spec file from scratch for mimedefang of all things. You had already one by the time I got it to you though.. but I did write it from scratch.

Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 22, 2006 23:07 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

There were supposed to be some :) at the end of the post.. but I seem to have forgotten them... so here they are

:) :).

Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 22, 2006 23:34 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

> There is precious little up-to-date documentation for creating .spec files

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/drafts/rpm-guide-en/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines

> Everyone I know starts with an existing .spec as and example and then modifies it.

Really shocking ;-)

Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 22, 2006 23:37 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmm, I was unaware of the docs on the fedoraproject.org site. I'll have to take a closer look.

Thanks.

Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 23, 2006 8:51 UTC (Wed) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]

Hmm, I was unaware of the docs on the fedoraproject.org site. I'll have to take a closer look.

In your defence, it would make more sense for this to be on rpm.org, which is a site that looks abandonned these days.

Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 22, 2006 23:40 UTC (Tue) by lovelace (guest, #278) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know anyone who has written a .spec file from scratch. Everyone I know starts with an existing .spec as and example and then modifies it. I wrote many spec files from scratch while I worked at a company that maintained its own rpm based distribution. It's not that hard. It just take a little bit of practice.

Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 22, 2006 23:40 UTC (Tue) by lovelace (guest, #278) [Link]

Ugh. Parden my formatting in my previous comment. :-( The italics were supposed to be a quote, but then I forgot that I was in html and needed a paragraph tag. :-(

Who maintains RPM?

Posted Aug 23, 2006 8:57 UTC (Wed) by mihaim (guest, #40072) [Link]

RPM is not that evil. I agree that are lots of macros and tweaks but in 99% of the cases you don't need to get that deep with the spec.
I wrote many of the specs for TFM/GNU Linux and also i patched rpm to finally implement --fetch. The patch was taken into consideration by Mr. Johnson and i think it got into rpm tree. Back to the point: writing .spec's is not that hard. Takes a little bit of practice.