1 To build RPM you will need several other packages:
2 --------------------------------------------------
4 The zlib library for compression support. You might also need/want
5 the zip executable for java jar dependency analysis. All available from
6 http://www.gzip.org/zlib/
8 The libmagic (aka file) library for file type detection (used by rpmbuild).
9 The source for the file utility + library is available from
10 ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/
12 The NSS library for encryption. This is available from
13 http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/
15 The Berkeley DB >= 4.3.x (4.5.x or newer recommended) is required for the
16 default database backend. BDB can be downloaded from
17 http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/index.html
19 RPM supports two different ways to include it, both methods have their
20 distinct advantages and disadvantages:
22 1) Building and using an internal copy of BDB
24 This is the "safe" way: upgrades to system BDB can not affect your
25 rpmdb integrity and you have full control over how BDB is configured.
26 On the other hand, any updates (security or bugfix) to BDB will require
29 To use this method, download a recent version of BDB from the URL above,
30 expand the tarball into rpm source directory root and create "db" symlink
32 $ wget http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.5.20.tar.gz
33 $ tar xzf db-4.5.20.tar.gz
35 $ ./configure [other options...]
37 2) Linking to external (system) BDB
39 If you can control when and how system BDB is upgraded, this option
40 saves space, removes the need to rebuild RPM in case of security etc
41 updates to BDB and also makes build rpm itself much faster. On the other
42 hand, major BDB upgrades can be disruptive, especially if
43 the on-disk format changes somehow.
45 To use this method, simply pass in --with-external-db to ./configure
46 script. If the system BDB is installed outside compiler + linker default
47 paths, you can use CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS to tell configure where to look,
50 $ ./configure --with-external-db CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/include/db45
52 Minimal instructions for building BDB are
54 ../dist/configure --with-posixmutexes
58 If you want to use the alternative SQLite backend for RPM database instead
59 of the default Berkeley DB, it can be enabled with --enable-sqlite3 option
60 to configure. Note that the SQLite backend is not as tested as BDB.
61 SQLite >= 3.x is required and is available from
62 http://www.sqlite.org/
64 For embedded Lua scripting support (recommended and enabled by default),
65 you'll need Lua >= 5.1 library + development environment installed.
66 Note that only the library is needed at runtime, RPM never calls external
67 Lua interpreter for anything. Lua is available from
70 If SELinux support is desired, it can be enabled with --with-selinux option
71 to configure and libselinux development environment installed. SELinux
73 http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/
75 It may be desired to install bzip2 and gzip so that RPM can use these
76 formats. Gzip, is necessary to build packages that contain compressed
77 tar balls, these are quite common on the Internet.
78 These are availible from
82 If you want to build the Python bindings to RPM library, it can be enabled
83 with --enable-python option to configure. You'll need to have Python (>= 2.3)
84 runtime and C API development environment installed, this is available from
85 http://www.python.org/
87 For best results you should compile with GCC and GNU Make. Users have
88 reported difficulty with other build tools (any patches to lift these
89 dependencies are welcome). Both GCC and GNU Make available from
92 If National Language Support (NLS) is desired you will need gnu
93 gettext (currently this is required to build rpm but we hope to
94 lift this requirement soon), available from
97 If you are going to hack the sources (or compile from source repository)
98 you will need most of the GNU development tools including:
99 autoconf, automake, gettext, libtool, makeinfo, perl, GNU m4, GNU tar
103 If you want to build RPM API documentation, use --enable-apidocs configure
104 option. Doxygen is needed for this, it's available at
105 http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/
107 If you plan on using cryptographic signatures you will need a version
108 of GPG, available from
109 http://www.gnupg.org/
114 RPM uses a small shell script to run: libtool, autoconf,
115 automake. This step should not be necessary if you are running a
116 released version of rpm, however if you have gotten the rpm sources
117 directly from the source code repository, you need to generate
118 intermediate files by running the autogen.sh script.
120 The autogen.sh script checks that the required tools are installed.
121 The autogen.sh script also runs configure for you and passes the command line
122 arguments to configure. To run it without configure type:
124 ./autogen.sh --noconfigure
126 If your libraries are not in a standard place you will need to change
127 configures environment. These options can be passed directly to
128 configure or to autogen.sh which will pass them through to configure.
131 LIBS='-L/opt/libz/ -L/opt/BerkeleyDB/lib/' \
132 CPPFLAGS='-I/opt/libz/ -I/opt/BerkeleyDB/include' \
135 If you have build tools stored in non standard places you should check
136 the resulting Makefile to be sure that the tools you wish to use have
137 been correctly identified. The configure script will modify your path
138 before looking for the build tools and it may find versions of these
139 tools that you do not want. It uses the following search path
141 MYPATH="/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH:/opt/gnu/bin"
143 now build the system with:
147 and then install with:
151 If you wish to make a tarfile of the binaries so that you may easily
152 install on machines with OS package managers other then rpm (ed note:
153 what about putting gzip and bzip2 in the tar, modifying the
158 when installing. If you do install from a tarball, you will need to do
164 to initialize your rpm database.
166 Finally, if you wish to prepare an rpm source tar ball, you should do
173 After RPM has been installed you can run rpm to build an rpm package.
174 Edit the rpm.spec file to mirror any special steps you needed to
175 follow to make rpm compile and change the specfile to match your
176 taste. You will need to put the rpm source tar file into the
177 SOURCES directory and we suggest putting the specfile in the
178 SPECS directory, then run rpmbuild -ba rpm.spec. You will end up
179 with two rpms which can be found in RPMS and SRPMS.
181 If you are going to install rpm on machines with OS package managers
182 other then rpm, you may choose to install the base rpm package via a
183 cpio instead of a tar file. Instead of running "make tar" during the
184 build process, as discribed above, use the base rpm packages to create
185 a cpio. After the rpms have been created run rpm2cpio on the base rpm
186 package, this will give you a cpio package which can then use to
187 install rpm on a new system.
189 rpm2cpio rpm-4.0-1.solaris2.6-sparc.rpm > rpm-4.0-1.solaris2.6-sparc.cpio
192 Non Linux Configuration Issues:
193 ------------------------------
199 Under RPM based Linux distributions all libraries (in fact all files
200 distributed with the OS) are under RPM control and this section is not
203 RPM will need to be informed of all the dependencies which were
204 satisfied before RPM was installed. Typically this only refers to
205 libraries that are installed by the OS, but may include other
206 libraries and packages which are availible at the time RPM is
207 installed and will not under RPM control. Another common example of
208 libraries which may need dependency provisions are precompiled
209 libraries which are installed by the OS package manager during system
210 build time. The list of dependencies you will wish to load into RPM
211 will depend on exactly how you bootstrap RPM onto your system and what
212 parts of the sytem you put into packages as well as on the specific OS
215 The script vpkg-provides.sh can be used to generate a package which
216 will satisfy the dependencies on your system. To run it you will need
217 to create a specfile header for this empty package and run the progam
220 --spec_header '/path/to/os-base-header.spec
222 and if you wish to ensure that some directories are not traversed you
225 --ignore_dirs 'egrep|pattern|of|paths|to|ignore
227 By default the generated rpm will include a %verifyscript to verify
228 checksum of all files traversed has not changed. This additional
229 check can be surpressed with:
233 The result of running the script will be a specfile which will create
234 a package continging all the dependencies found on the system. There
235 will be one provides line for each depednecy. The package will contain
236 none of the actual OS library files as it is assumed they are already
237 on your system and managed by other means. Here is a example
238 (truncated) of the provides lines used by one user of Digital Unix. (I
239 have put several provides on the same line for brevity)
241 provides: /bin/sh /usr/bin/ksh /usr/bin/csh
242 provides: libc.so.osf.1 libm.so.osf.1 libcurses.so.xpg4 libdb.so.osf.1
243 provides: libX11.so libXaw.so.6.0 libXext.so libXm.so.motif1.2 libXmu.so
244 provides: libdnet_stub.so.osf.1 libsecurity.so.osf.1 libpthread.so.osf.1
245 provides: libexc.so.osf.1 libmach.so.osf.1 libdps.so libdpstk.so
248 The script vpkg-provides2.sh is underdevelopment as a more advanced
249 version of vpkg-provides.sh which is aware of many different unix
250 vendor packaging schemes. It will create one "dependency package" for
251 each unix package your OS vendor installed.
257 If you plan on packaging for more then one OS you may want to edit
258 /etc/macros or /usr/lib/rpm/macros and change the line which has
259 rpmfilename to something which include both the %{_target_os} and
260 %{_target_cpu}. This will cause the name of the generated rpm files
261 to the operating system name as well as the architecture which the rpm
262 runs under. The line to change looks like:
264 %_rpmfilename %%{ARCH}/%%{NAME}-%%{VERSION}-%%{RELEASE}.%%{ARCH}.rpm
266 you may wish to include both the %{_target_os} and %{_target_cpu} in
267 the final base name, so that it's easier to distinguish between what
268 package is appropriate for a particular arch-os-version combo. We
271 %_rpmfilename %%{_target_platform/%%{NAME}-%%{VERSION}-%%{RELEASE}.%%{_target_platform}.rpm
273 There is no %{_target_os_version} tag, so if you need to also
274 distinguish between RPMs for certain versions of the OS, you can
275 hard-code the version in the rpmrc on the build machine, so that .rpm
276 files are generated with the version as part of the filename.
278 For example when one user builds RPMs for Digital Unix 4.0b and 4.0d,
279 optimization is important and he will build one set of RPMs for the
280 EV4 processor and another set for the EV56 processor. He specifies
281 both the OS version (if it's important, as it is for a few packages)
282 and the processor version by default by setting a special rpmfilename:
283 on the particular build machine.
285 The "rpmfilename: "tag on one machine (Digital Unix 4.0d, EV56 PWS 433)
288 rpmfilename: %{_target_os}/4.0d/%{_target_cpu}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{_target_os}-%{_target_cpu}ev56.rpm
290 For package `foo-1.1', at build time that would translate into:
292 osf1/4.0d/alpha/foo-1.1-1.osf1-alphaev56.rpm
294 The hyphen between the %{_target_cpu} and ev56 is left out for compatibility
295 with GNU Config.guess and because `alphaev56' looks more "normal" to
296 people with an alpha than alpha-ev56 for someone on an Intel Pentium
297 Pro would want `i586pro' over `i586-pro', but it does make parsing
298 this filename by other programs a bit more difficult.
304 To use the signing features of rpm, you will need to configure certain
305 rpm macros in ~/.rpmmacros:
309 %_gpg_path %(echo $HOME)/.gnupg