To build RPM you will need several other packages: -------------------------------------------------- The zlib library for compression support. You might also need/want the unzip executable for java jar dependency analysis. All available from http://www.gzip.org/zlib/ The libmagic (aka file) library for file type detection (used by rpmbuild). The source for the file utility + library is available from ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/ The NSS >= 3.12 library for encryption, and NSPR library which NSS uses. Both NSPR and NSS libraries and headers need to be installed during RPM compilation. As NSPR and NSS typically install their headers outside the regular include search path, you need to tell configure about this, eg something like: ./configure <......> CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/nspr -I/usr/include/nss" The NSPR and NSS libraries are available from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/ http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/ The Berkeley DB >= 4.3.x (4.5.x or newer recommended) is required for the default database backend. BDB can be downloaded from http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/index.html RPM supports two different ways to include it, both methods have their distinct advantages and disadvantages: 1) Building and using an internal copy of BDB This is the "safe" way: upgrades to system BDB can not affect your rpmdb integrity and you have full control over how BDB is configured. On the other hand, any updates (security or bugfix) to BDB will require rebuilding RPM. To use this method, download a recent version of BDB from the URL above, expand the tarball into rpm source directory root and create "db" symlink to it, eg: $ wget http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.5.20.tar.gz $ tar xzf db-4.5.20.tar.gz $ ln -s db-4.5.20 db $ ./configure [other options...] 2) Linking to external (system) BDB If you can control when and how system BDB is upgraded, this option saves space, removes the need to rebuild RPM in case of security etc updates to BDB and also makes build rpm itself much faster. On the other hand, major BDB upgrades can be disruptive, especially if the on-disk format changes somehow. To use this method, simply pass in --with-external-db to ./configure script. If the system BDB is installed outside compiler + linker default paths, you can use CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS to tell configure where to look, for example: $ ./configure --with-external-db CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/include/db45 Minimal instructions for building BDB are cd build_unix ../dist/configure --with-posixmutexes make make install For embedded Lua scripting support (recommended and enabled by default), you'll need Lua >= 5.1 library + development environment installed. Note that only the library is needed at runtime, RPM never calls external Lua interpreter for anything. Lua is available from http://www.lua.org If SELinux support is desired, it can be enabled with --with-selinux option to configure and libselinux development environment installed. SELinux is available from http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/ It may be desired to install bzip2, gzip, and xz/lzma so that RPM can use these formats. Gzip is necessary to build packages that contain compressed tar balls, these are quite common on the Internet. These are availible from http://www.gzip.org http://www.bzip.org http://tukaani.org/xz/ If you want to build the Python bindings to RPM library, it can be enabled with --enable-python option to configure. You'll need to have Python (>= 2.3) runtime and C API development environment installed, this is available from http://www.python.org/ To enable POSIX.1e draft 15 file capabilities support, configure with --with-cap. You'll also need recent libcap, available from: http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/security/linux-privs/libcap2/ To enable POSIX 1003.1e draft 17 ACL verification support, configure with --with-acl. You'll also need the ACL library, available from: ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/cmd_tars/ For best results you should compile with GCC and GNU Make. Users have reported difficulty with other build tools (any patches to lift these dependencies are welcome). Both GCC and GNU Make available from http://www.gnu.org/ If National Language Support (NLS) is desired you will need gnu gettext (currently this is required to build rpm but we hope to lift this requirement soon), available from http://www.gnu.org/ If you are going to hack the sources (or compile from source repository) you will need most of the GNU development tools including: autoconf, automake, gettext, libtool, makeinfo, perl, GNU m4, GNU tar available from http://www.gnu.org/ RPM distribution tarballs come with doxygen generated HTML documentation for the public RPM API, but if you want to generate documentation for the entire source including internal API's, use --enable-hackingdocs configure option. Doxygen is needed for this, it's available at http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/ If you plan on using cryptographic signatures you will need a version of GPG, available from http://www.gnupg.org/ To compile RPM: -------------- RPM uses a small shell script to run: libtool, autoconf, automake. This step should not be necessary if you are running a released version of rpm, however if you have gotten the rpm sources directly from the source code repository, you need to generate intermediate files by running the autogen.sh script. The autogen.sh script checks that the required tools are installed. The autogen.sh script also runs configure for you and passes the command line arguments to configure. To run it without configure type: ./autogen.sh --noconfigure If your libraries are not in a standard place you will need to change configures environment. These options can be passed directly to configure or to autogen.sh which will pass them through to configure. Here is an example: LIBS='-L/opt/libz/ -L/opt/BerkeleyDB/lib/' \ CPPFLAGS='-I/opt/libz/ -I/opt/BerkeleyDB/include' \ ./configure If you have build tools stored in non standard places you should check the resulting Makefile to be sure that the tools you wish to use have been correctly identified. The configure script will modify your path before looking for the build tools and it may find versions of these tools that you do not want. It uses the following search path MYPATH="/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH:/opt/gnu/bin" now build the system with: make and then install with: make install Rpm comes with an automated self-test suite. The test-suite relies heavily on fakechroot (https://github.com/fakechroot/) and cannot be executed without it. Provided that fakechroot was found during configure, it can be executed after a succesful build with: make check Finally, if you wish to prepare an rpm source tar ball, you should do make dist To package RPM: -------------- After RPM has been installed you can run rpm to build an rpm package. Edit the rpm.spec file to mirror any special steps you needed to follow to make rpm compile and change the specfile to match your taste. You will need to put the rpm source tar file into the SOURCES directory and we suggest putting the specfile in the SPECS directory, then run rpmbuild -ba rpm.spec. You will end up with two rpms which can be found in RPMS and SRPMS. If you are going to install rpm on machines with OS package managers other then rpm, you may choose to install the base rpm package via a cpio instead of a tar file. Instead of running "make tar" during the build process, as discribed above, use the base rpm packages to create a cpio. After the rpms have been created run rpm2cpio on the base rpm package, this will give you a cpio package which can then use to install rpm on a new system. rpm2cpio rpm-4.0-1.solaris2.6-sparc.rpm > rpm-4.0-1.solaris2.6-sparc.cpio Non Linux Configuration Issues: ------------------------------ OS dependencies: ---------------- Under RPM based Linux distributions all libraries (in fact all files distributed with the OS) are under RPM control and this section is not an issue. RPM will need to be informed of all the dependencies which were satisfied before RPM was installed. Typically this only refers to libraries that are installed by the OS, but may include other libraries and packages which are availible at the time RPM is installed and will not under RPM control. Another common example of libraries which may need dependency provisions are precompiled libraries which are installed by the OS package manager during system build time. The list of dependencies you will wish to load into RPM will depend on exactly how you bootstrap RPM onto your system and what parts of the sytem you put into packages as well as on the specific OS you are using. The script vpkg-provides.sh can be used to generate a package which will satisfy the dependencies on your system. To run it you will need to create a specfile header for this empty package and run the progam with: --spec_header '/path/to/os-base-header.spec and if you wish to ensure that some directories are not traversed you can use the option: --ignore_dirs 'grep-E|pattern|of|paths|to|ignore By default the generated rpm will include a %verifyscript to verify checksum of all files traversed has not changed. This additional check can be surpressed with: --no_verify The result of running the script will be a specfile which will create a package continging all the dependencies found on the system. There will be one provides line for each depednecy. The package will contain none of the actual OS library files as it is assumed they are already on your system and managed by other means. Here is a example (truncated) of the provides lines used by one user of Digital Unix. (I have put several provides on the same line for brevity) provides: /bin/sh /usr/bin/ksh /usr/bin/csh provides: libc.so.osf.1 libm.so.osf.1 libcurses.so.xpg4 libdb.so.osf.1 provides: libX11.so libXaw.so.6.0 libXext.so libXm.so.motif1.2 libXmu.so provides: libdnet_stub.so.osf.1 libsecurity.so.osf.1 libpthread.so.osf.1 provides: libexc.so.osf.1 libmach.so.osf.1 libdps.so libdpstk.so The script vpkg-provides2.sh is underdevelopment as a more advanced version of vpkg-provides.sh which is aware of many different unix vendor packaging schemes. It will create one "dependency package" for each unix package your OS vendor installed. rpmfilename: ----------- If you plan on packaging for more then one OS you may want to edit /etc/macros or /usr/lib/rpm/macros and change the line which has rpmfilename to something which include both the %{_target_os} and %{_target_cpu}. This will cause the name of the generated rpm files to the operating system name as well as the architecture which the rpm runs under. The line to change looks like: %_rpmfilename %%{ARCH}/%%{NAME}-%%{VERSION}-%%{RELEASE}.%%{ARCH}.rpm you may wish to include both the %{_target_os} and %{_target_cpu} in the final base name, so that it's easier to distinguish between what package is appropriate for a particular arch-os-version combo. We suggest: %_rpmfilename %%{_target_platform/%%{NAME}-%%{VERSION}-%%{RELEASE}.%%{_target_platform}.rpm There is no %{_target_os_version} tag, so if you need to also distinguish between RPMs for certain versions of the OS, you can hard-code the version in the rpmrc on the build machine, so that .rpm files are generated with the version as part of the filename. For example when one user builds RPMs for Digital Unix 4.0b and 4.0d, optimization is important and he will build one set of RPMs for the EV4 processor and another set for the EV56 processor. He specifies both the OS version (if it's important, as it is for a few packages) and the processor version by default by setting a special rpmfilename: on the particular build machine. The "rpmfilename: "tag on one machine (Digital Unix 4.0d, EV56 PWS 433) looks like: rpmfilename: %{_target_os}/4.0d/%{_target_cpu}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{_target_os}-%{_target_cpu}ev56.rpm For package `foo-1.1', at build time that would translate into: osf1/4.0d/alpha/foo-1.1-1.osf1-alphaev56.rpm The hyphen between the %{_target_cpu} and ev56 is left out for compatibility with GNU Config.guess and because `alphaev56' looks more "normal" to people with an alpha than alpha-ev56 for someone on an Intel Pentium Pro would want `i586pro' over `i586-pro', but it does make parsing this filename by other programs a bit more difficult. GPG --- To use the signing features of rpm, you will need to configure certain rpm macros in ~/.rpmmacros: %_gpg_name %_gpg_path %(echo $HOME)/.gnupg