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 You will need a cryptographic library to support digests and signatures.
13 This library may be Mozilla NSS, OpenSSL or beecrypt. Which library to use
14 must be specified with the --with-crypto=[beecrypt|nss|openssl] argument
17 If using the Mozilla NSS library for encyption (and NSPR library which
18 NSS uses) it must be version 3.12 or later. Both NSPR and NSS libraries and
19 headers need to be installed during RPM compilation. As NSPR and NSS
20 typically install their headers outside the regular include search path,
21 you need to tell configure about this, eg something like:
22 ./configure <......> CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/nspr -I/usr/include/nss"
24 The NSPR and NSS libraries are available from
25 http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/
26 http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/
28 If using the OpenSSL library for encryption, it must be version 1.0.2 or
29 later. Note: when compiling against OpenSSL, there is a possible license
30 incompatibility. For more details on this, see
31 https://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html
32 Some Linux distributions have different legal interpretations of this
33 possible incompatibility. It is recommended to consult with a lawyer before
34 building RPM against OpenSSL.
35 Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:FAQ#What.27s_the_deal_with_the_OpenSSL_license.3F
36 Debian: https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/10/msg00113.html
38 The OpenSSL crypto library is available from https://www.openssl.org/
40 The Berkeley DB >= 4.3.x (4.5.x or newer recommended) is required for the
41 default database backend. BDB can be downloaded from
42 http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/index.html
44 RPM supports two different ways to include it, both methods have their
45 distinct advantages and disadvantages:
47 1) Building and using an internal copy of BDB
49 This is the "safe" way: upgrades to system BDB can not affect your
50 rpmdb integrity and you have full control over how BDB is configured.
51 On the other hand, any updates (security or bugfix) to BDB will require
54 To use this method, download a recent version of BDB from the URL above,
55 expand the tarball into rpm source directory root and create "db" symlink
57 $ wget http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.5.20.tar.gz
58 $ tar xzf db-4.5.20.tar.gz
60 $ ./configure [other options...]
62 2) Linking to external (system) BDB
64 If you can control when and how system BDB is upgraded, this option
65 saves space, removes the need to rebuild RPM in case of security etc
66 updates to BDB and also makes build rpm itself much faster. On the other
67 hand, major BDB upgrades can be disruptive, especially if
68 the on-disk format changes somehow.
70 To use this method, simply pass in --with-external-db to ./configure
71 script. If the system BDB is installed outside compiler + linker default
72 paths, you can use CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS to tell configure where to look,
75 $ ./configure --with-external-db CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/include/db45
77 Minimal instructions for building BDB are
79 ../dist/configure --with-posixmutexes
83 For embedded Lua scripting support (recommended and enabled by default),
84 you'll need Lua >= 5.1 library + development environment installed.
85 Note that only the library is needed at runtime, RPM never calls external
86 Lua interpreter for anything. Lua is available from
89 If SELinux support is desired, it can be enabled with --with-selinux option
90 to configure and libselinux development environment installed. SELinux
92 http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/
94 It may be desired to install bzip2, gzip, and xz/lzma so that RPM can use these
95 formats. Gzip is necessary to build packages that contain compressed
96 tar balls, these are quite common on the Internet.
97 These are available from
100 http://tukaani.org/xz/
102 If you want to build the Python bindings to RPM library, it can be enabled
103 with --enable-python option to configure. You'll need to have Python (>= 2.3)
104 runtime and C API development environment installed, this is available from
105 http://www.python.org/
107 To enable POSIX.1e draft 15 file capabilities support, configure with
108 --with-cap. You'll also need recent libcap, available from:
109 http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/security/linux-privs/libcap2/
111 To enable POSIX 1003.1e draft 17 ACL verification support, configure with
112 --with-acl. You'll also need the ACL library, available from:
113 ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/cmd_tars/
115 For best results you should compile with GCC and GNU Make. Users have
116 reported difficulty with other build tools (any patches to lift these
117 dependencies are welcome). Both GCC and GNU Make available from
120 If National Language Support (NLS) is desired you will need gnu
121 gettext (currently this is required to build rpm but we hope to
122 lift this requirement soon), available from
125 If you are going to hack the sources (or compile from source repository)
126 you will need most of the GNU development tools including:
127 autoconf, automake, gettext, libtool, makeinfo, perl, GNU m4, GNU tar
131 RPM distribution tarballs come with doxygen generated HTML documentation
132 for the public RPM API, but if you want to generate documentation for
133 the entire source including internal API's, use --enable-hackingdocs
134 configure option. Doxygen is needed for this, it's available at
135 http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/
137 If you plan on using cryptographic signatures you will need a version
138 of GPG, available from
139 http://www.gnupg.org/
144 RPM uses a small shell script to run: libtool, autoconf,
145 automake. This step should not be necessary if you are running a
146 released version of rpm, however if you have gotten the rpm sources
147 directly from the source code repository, you need to generate
148 intermediate files by running the autogen.sh script.
150 The autogen.sh script checks that the required tools are installed.
151 The autogen.sh script also runs configure for you and passes the command line
152 arguments to configure. To run it without configure type:
154 ./autogen.sh --noconfigure
156 If your libraries are not in a standard place you will need to change
157 configures environment. These options can be passed directly to
158 configure or to autogen.sh which will pass them through to configure.
161 LIBS='-L/opt/libz/ -L/opt/BerkeleyDB/lib/' \
162 CPPFLAGS='-I/opt/libz/ -I/opt/BerkeleyDB/include' \
165 If you have build tools stored in non standard places you should check
166 the resulting Makefile to be sure that the tools you wish to use have
167 been correctly identified. The configure script will modify your path
168 before looking for the build tools and it may find versions of these
169 tools that you do not want. It uses the following search path
171 MYPATH="/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH:/opt/gnu/bin"
173 now build the system with:
177 and then install with:
181 Rpm comes with an automated self-test suite. The test-suite relies heavily
182 on fakechroot (https://github.com/dex4er/fakechroot/) and cannot be executed
183 without it. Provided that fakechroot was found during configure,
184 it can be executed after a successful build with:
188 Finally, if you wish to prepare an rpm source tar ball, you should do
195 After RPM has been installed you can run rpm to build an rpm package.
196 Edit the rpm.spec file to mirror any special steps you needed to
197 follow to make rpm compile and change the specfile to match your
198 taste. You will need to put the rpm source tar file into the
199 SOURCES directory and we suggest putting the specfile in the
200 SPECS directory, then run rpmbuild -ba rpm.spec. You will end up
201 with two rpms which can be found in RPMS and SRPMS.
203 If you are going to install rpm on machines with OS package managers
204 other then rpm, you may choose to install the base rpm package via a
205 cpio instead of a tar file. Instead of running "make tar" during the
206 build process, as described above, use the base rpm packages to create
207 a cpio. After the rpms have been created run rpm2cpio on the base rpm
208 package, this will give you a cpio package which can then use to
209 install rpm on a new system.
211 rpm2cpio rpm-4.0-1.solaris2.6-sparc.rpm > rpm-4.0-1.solaris2.6-sparc.cpio
214 Non Linux Configuration Issues:
215 ------------------------------
221 Under RPM based Linux distributions all libraries (in fact all files
222 distributed with the OS) are under RPM control and this section is not
225 RPM will need to be informed of all the dependencies which were
226 satisfied before RPM was installed. Typically this only refers to
227 libraries that are installed by the OS, but may include other
228 libraries and packages which are available at the time RPM is
229 installed and will not under RPM control. Another common example of
230 libraries which may need dependency provisions are precompiled
231 libraries which are installed by the OS package manager during system
232 build time. The list of dependencies you will wish to load into RPM
233 will depend on exactly how you bootstrap RPM onto your system and what
234 parts of the system you put into packages as well as on the specific OS
237 The script vpkg-provides.sh can be used to generate a package which
238 will satisfy the dependencies on your system. To run it you will need
239 to create a specfile header for this empty package and run the progam
242 --spec_header '/path/to/os-base-header.spec
244 and if you wish to ensure that some directories are not traversed you
247 --ignore_dirs 'grep-E|pattern|of|paths|to|ignore
249 By default the generated rpm will include a %verifyscript to verify
250 checksum of all files traversed has not changed. This additional
251 check can be suppressed with:
255 The result of running the script will be a specfile which will create
256 a package continging all the dependencies found on the system. There
257 will be one provides line for each depednecy. The package will contain
258 none of the actual OS library files as it is assumed they are already
259 on your system and managed by other means. Here is a example
260 (truncated) of the provides lines used by one user of Digital Unix. (I
261 have put several provides on the same line for brevity)
263 provides: /bin/sh /usr/bin/ksh /usr/bin/csh
264 provides: libc.so.osf.1 libm.so.osf.1 libcurses.so.xpg4 libdb.so.osf.1
265 provides: libX11.so libXaw.so.6.0 libXext.so libXm.so.motif1.2 libXmu.so
266 provides: libdnet_stub.so.osf.1 libsecurity.so.osf.1 libpthread.so.osf.1
267 provides: libexc.so.osf.1 libmach.so.osf.1 libdps.so libdpstk.so
270 The script vpkg-provides2.sh is underdevelopment as a more advanced
271 version of vpkg-provides.sh which is aware of many different unix
272 vendor packaging schemes. It will create one "dependency package" for
273 each unix package your OS vendor installed.
279 If you plan on packaging for more then one OS you may want to edit
280 /etc/macros or /usr/lib/rpm/macros and change the line which has
281 rpmfilename to something which include both the %{_target_os} and
282 %{_target_cpu}. This will cause the name of the generated rpm files
283 to the operating system name as well as the architecture which the rpm
284 runs under. The line to change looks like:
286 %_rpmfilename %%{ARCH}/%%{NAME}-%%{VERSION}-%%{RELEASE}.%%{ARCH}.rpm
288 you may wish to include both the %{_target_os} and %{_target_cpu} in
289 the final base name, so that it's easier to distinguish between what
290 package is appropriate for a particular arch-os-version combo. We
293 %_rpmfilename %%{_target_platform/%%{NAME}-%%{VERSION}-%%{RELEASE}.%%{_target_platform}.rpm
295 There is no %{_target_os_version} tag, so if you need to also
296 distinguish between RPMs for certain versions of the OS, you can
297 hard-code the version in the rpmrc on the build machine, so that .rpm
298 files are generated with the version as part of the filename.
300 For example when one user builds RPMs for Digital Unix 4.0b and 4.0d,
301 optimization is important and he will build one set of RPMs for the
302 EV4 processor and another set for the EV56 processor. He specifies
303 both the OS version (if it's important, as it is for a few packages)
304 and the processor version by default by setting a special rpmfilename:
305 on the particular build machine.
307 The "rpmfilename: "tag on one machine (Digital Unix 4.0d, EV56 PWS 433)
310 rpmfilename: %{_target_os}/4.0d/%{_target_cpu}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{_target_os}-%{_target_cpu}ev56.rpm
312 For package `foo-1.1', at build time that would translate into:
314 osf1/4.0d/alpha/foo-1.1-1.osf1-alphaev56.rpm
316 The hyphen between the %{_target_cpu} and ev56 is left out for compatibility
317 with GNU Config.guess and because `alphaev56' looks more "normal" to
318 people with an alpha than alpha-ev56 for someone on an Intel Pentium
319 Pro would want `i586pro' over `i586-pro', but it does make parsing
320 this filename by other programs a bit more difficult.
326 To use the signing features of rpm, you will need to configure certain
327 rpm macros in ~/.rpmmacros:
330 %_gpg_path %(echo $HOME)/.gnupg