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 unzip 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, and NSPR library which NSS uses.
13 Both NSPR and NSS libraries and headers need to be installed during RPM
14 compilation. As NSPR and NSS typically install their headers outside
15 the regular include search path, you need to tell configure about this,
17 ./configure <......> CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/nspr -I/usr/include/nss"
19 The NSPR and NSS libraries are available from
20 http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/
21 http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/
23 The Berkeley DB >= 4.3.x (4.5.x or newer recommended) is required for the
24 default database backend. BDB can be downloaded from
25 http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/index.html
27 RPM supports two different ways to include it, both methods have their
28 distinct advantages and disadvantages:
30 1) Building and using an internal copy of BDB
32 This is the "safe" way: upgrades to system BDB can not affect your
33 rpmdb integrity and you have full control over how BDB is configured.
34 On the other hand, any updates (security or bugfix) to BDB will require
37 To use this method, download a recent version of BDB from the URL above,
38 expand the tarball into rpm source directory root and create "db" symlink
40 $ wget http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.5.20.tar.gz
41 $ tar xzf db-4.5.20.tar.gz
43 $ ./configure [other options...]
45 2) Linking to external (system) BDB
47 If you can control when and how system BDB is upgraded, this option
48 saves space, removes the need to rebuild RPM in case of security etc
49 updates to BDB and also makes build rpm itself much faster. On the other
50 hand, major BDB upgrades can be disruptive, especially if
51 the on-disk format changes somehow.
53 To use this method, simply pass in --with-external-db to ./configure
54 script. If the system BDB is installed outside compiler + linker default
55 paths, you can use CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS to tell configure where to look,
58 $ ./configure --with-external-db CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/include/db45
60 Minimal instructions for building BDB are
62 ../dist/configure --with-posixmutexes
66 For embedded Lua scripting support (recommended and enabled by default),
67 you'll need Lua >= 5.1 library + development environment installed.
68 Note that only the library is needed at runtime, RPM never calls external
69 Lua interpreter for anything. Lua is available from
72 If SELinux support is desired, it can be enabled with --with-selinux option
73 to configure and libselinux development environment installed. SELinux
75 http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/
77 It may be desired to install bzip2, gzip, and xz/lzma so that RPM can use these
78 formats. Gzip is necessary to build packages that contain compressed
79 tar balls, these are quite common on the Internet.
80 These are availible from
83 http://tukaani.org/xz/
85 If you want to build the Python bindings to RPM library, it can be enabled
86 with --enable-python option to configure. You'll need to have Python (>= 2.3)
87 runtime and C API development environment installed, this is available from
88 http://www.python.org/
90 To enable POSIX.1e draft 15 file capabilities support, configure with
91 --with-cap. You'll also need recent libcap, available from:
92 http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/security/linux-privs/libcap2/
94 To enable POSIX 1003.1e draft 17 ACL verification support, configure with
95 --with-acl. You'll also need the ACL library, available from:
96 ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/cmd_tars/
98 For best results you should compile with GCC and GNU Make. Users have
99 reported difficulty with other build tools (any patches to lift these
100 dependencies are welcome). Both GCC and GNU Make available from
103 If National Language Support (NLS) is desired you will need gnu
104 gettext (currently this is required to build rpm but we hope to
105 lift this requirement soon), available from
108 If you are going to hack the sources (or compile from source repository)
109 you will need most of the GNU development tools including:
110 autoconf, automake, gettext, libtool, makeinfo, perl, GNU m4, GNU tar
114 RPM distribution tarballs come with doxygen generated HTML documentation
115 for the public RPM API, but if you want to generate documentation for
116 the entire source including internal API's, use --enable-hackingdocs
117 configure option. Doxygen is needed for this, it's available at
118 http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/
120 If you plan on using cryptographic signatures you will need a version
121 of GPG, available from
122 http://www.gnupg.org/
127 RPM uses a small shell script to run: libtool, autoconf,
128 automake. This step should not be necessary if you are running a
129 released version of rpm, however if you have gotten the rpm sources
130 directly from the source code repository, you need to generate
131 intermediate files by running the autogen.sh script.
133 The autogen.sh script checks that the required tools are installed.
134 The autogen.sh script also runs configure for you and passes the command line
135 arguments to configure. To run it without configure type:
137 ./autogen.sh --noconfigure
139 If your libraries are not in a standard place you will need to change
140 configures environment. These options can be passed directly to
141 configure or to autogen.sh which will pass them through to configure.
144 LIBS='-L/opt/libz/ -L/opt/BerkeleyDB/lib/' \
145 CPPFLAGS='-I/opt/libz/ -I/opt/BerkeleyDB/include' \
148 If you have build tools stored in non standard places you should check
149 the resulting Makefile to be sure that the tools you wish to use have
150 been correctly identified. The configure script will modify your path
151 before looking for the build tools and it may find versions of these
152 tools that you do not want. It uses the following search path
154 MYPATH="/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH:/opt/gnu/bin"
156 now build the system with:
160 and then install with:
164 If you wish to make a tarfile of the binaries so that you may easily
165 install on machines with OS package managers other then rpm (ed note:
166 what about putting gzip and bzip2 in the tar, modifying the
171 when installing. If you do install from a tarball, you will need to do
177 to initialize your rpm database.
179 Finally, if you wish to prepare an rpm source tar ball, you should do
186 After RPM has been installed you can run rpm to build an rpm package.
187 Edit the rpm.spec file to mirror any special steps you needed to
188 follow to make rpm compile and change the specfile to match your
189 taste. You will need to put the rpm source tar file into the
190 SOURCES directory and we suggest putting the specfile in the
191 SPECS directory, then run rpmbuild -ba rpm.spec. You will end up
192 with two rpms which can be found in RPMS and SRPMS.
194 If you are going to install rpm on machines with OS package managers
195 other then rpm, you may choose to install the base rpm package via a
196 cpio instead of a tar file. Instead of running "make tar" during the
197 build process, as discribed above, use the base rpm packages to create
198 a cpio. After the rpms have been created run rpm2cpio on the base rpm
199 package, this will give you a cpio package which can then use to
200 install rpm on a new system.
202 rpm2cpio rpm-4.0-1.solaris2.6-sparc.rpm > rpm-4.0-1.solaris2.6-sparc.cpio
205 Non Linux Configuration Issues:
206 ------------------------------
212 Under RPM based Linux distributions all libraries (in fact all files
213 distributed with the OS) are under RPM control and this section is not
216 RPM will need to be informed of all the dependencies which were
217 satisfied before RPM was installed. Typically this only refers to
218 libraries that are installed by the OS, but may include other
219 libraries and packages which are availible at the time RPM is
220 installed and will not under RPM control. Another common example of
221 libraries which may need dependency provisions are precompiled
222 libraries which are installed by the OS package manager during system
223 build time. The list of dependencies you will wish to load into RPM
224 will depend on exactly how you bootstrap RPM onto your system and what
225 parts of the sytem you put into packages as well as on the specific OS
228 The script vpkg-provides.sh can be used to generate a package which
229 will satisfy the dependencies on your system. To run it you will need
230 to create a specfile header for this empty package and run the progam
233 --spec_header '/path/to/os-base-header.spec
235 and if you wish to ensure that some directories are not traversed you
238 --ignore_dirs 'grep-E|pattern|of|paths|to|ignore
240 By default the generated rpm will include a %verifyscript to verify
241 checksum of all files traversed has not changed. This additional
242 check can be surpressed with:
246 The result of running the script will be a specfile which will create
247 a package continging all the dependencies found on the system. There
248 will be one provides line for each depednecy. The package will contain
249 none of the actual OS library files as it is assumed they are already
250 on your system and managed by other means. Here is a example
251 (truncated) of the provides lines used by one user of Digital Unix. (I
252 have put several provides on the same line for brevity)
254 provides: /bin/sh /usr/bin/ksh /usr/bin/csh
255 provides: libc.so.osf.1 libm.so.osf.1 libcurses.so.xpg4 libdb.so.osf.1
256 provides: libX11.so libXaw.so.6.0 libXext.so libXm.so.motif1.2 libXmu.so
257 provides: libdnet_stub.so.osf.1 libsecurity.so.osf.1 libpthread.so.osf.1
258 provides: libexc.so.osf.1 libmach.so.osf.1 libdps.so libdpstk.so
261 The script vpkg-provides2.sh is underdevelopment as a more advanced
262 version of vpkg-provides.sh which is aware of many different unix
263 vendor packaging schemes. It will create one "dependency package" for
264 each unix package your OS vendor installed.
270 If you plan on packaging for more then one OS you may want to edit
271 /etc/macros or /usr/lib/rpm/macros and change the line which has
272 rpmfilename to something which include both the %{_target_os} and
273 %{_target_cpu}. This will cause the name of the generated rpm files
274 to the operating system name as well as the architecture which the rpm
275 runs under. The line to change looks like:
277 %_rpmfilename %%{ARCH}/%%{NAME}-%%{VERSION}-%%{RELEASE}.%%{ARCH}.rpm
279 you may wish to include both the %{_target_os} and %{_target_cpu} in
280 the final base name, so that it's easier to distinguish between what
281 package is appropriate for a particular arch-os-version combo. We
284 %_rpmfilename %%{_target_platform/%%{NAME}-%%{VERSION}-%%{RELEASE}.%%{_target_platform}.rpm
286 There is no %{_target_os_version} tag, so if you need to also
287 distinguish between RPMs for certain versions of the OS, you can
288 hard-code the version in the rpmrc on the build machine, so that .rpm
289 files are generated with the version as part of the filename.
291 For example when one user builds RPMs for Digital Unix 4.0b and 4.0d,
292 optimization is important and he will build one set of RPMs for the
293 EV4 processor and another set for the EV56 processor. He specifies
294 both the OS version (if it's important, as it is for a few packages)
295 and the processor version by default by setting a special rpmfilename:
296 on the particular build machine.
298 The "rpmfilename: "tag on one machine (Digital Unix 4.0d, EV56 PWS 433)
301 rpmfilename: %{_target_os}/4.0d/%{_target_cpu}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{_target_os}-%{_target_cpu}ev56.rpm
303 For package `foo-1.1', at build time that would translate into:
305 osf1/4.0d/alpha/foo-1.1-1.osf1-alphaev56.rpm
307 The hyphen between the %{_target_cpu} and ev56 is left out for compatibility
308 with GNU Config.guess and because `alphaev56' looks more "normal" to
309 people with an alpha than alpha-ev56 for someone on an Intel Pentium
310 Pro would want `i586pro' over `i586-pro', but it does make parsing
311 this filename by other programs a bit more difficult.
317 To use the signing features of rpm, you will need to configure certain
318 rpm macros in ~/.rpmmacros:
322 %_gpg_path %(echo $HOME)/.gnupg