On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Marius Roets wrote:-

Hi everybody, I have some question on creating RPM's for a Suse distribution. 1) Does Suse have a specific way of doing things?

They have a "build" script that will create a clean build environment and build RPMs within that environment. There's also the build service. Or you can just use rpmbuild. Since I haven't got an account to use the build service, and I like to build packages as a normal user rather than root, I use rpmbuild.

2) If yes, is there a howto somewhere?

Check out http://www.opensuse.org/ and also pay attention to the SUSE package conventions.

3) How do I test it without having a second clean system?

Good question. So far I've not had a problem with building and testing on the same system.

4) If I want to create rpm's for more than one Suse version, do I need to build it on each one?

Yes. Each version of SUSE has different library versions and building against one version isn't a guarantee that it will work on an earlier or later version.

5) And if I want to make distro independent (well suppose it's not completely possible) rpm? Any tips on doing that.

A noarch rpm? As in doesn't matter if it's PPC or Intel, 32bit or 64bit? As long as the RPMs doesn't contain any binaries, just scripts or even plain data files, it can be built as noarch. If you're meaning distro-independent as in can install on SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, and other distributions, then yes you can as well. If you write the spec file to handle the minor differences in menu-handling[0], or file locations[1], you can make a source rpm that will build on the different distributions. Or, if you don't need a desktop menu entry, you can statically link the binaries and then you don't rely on the shared libraries being present on the target system. That's something I'm fiddling about with right now. My multi-distribution spec file looks to see which system it's running on, and sets up some variables and default paths, depending on the distribution. An example of my multi-distribution spec file is here: URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/linux/specfiles/template.spec I don't know what other packagers think about it, but I've been using it as the basis for spec files for several packages I've built for 32bit SUSE 9.0-9.3, 32bit and 64bit SUSE 10.0 and 10.1, 32bit openSUSE 10.2alpha5, and Fedora Core 5, and all the packages have built as they should. It's even kind enough to put the distribution and version as a part of the rpm filename. E.g. the package kenny (translates to and from the Southpark kenny-speak) has the following packages: kenny-1.7-1.fc5.noarch.rpm kenny-1.7-1.suse93.noarch.rpm kenny-1.7-1.suse100.noarch.rpm kenny-1.7-1.suse101.noarch.rpm kenny-1.7-1.suse102.noarch.rpm Finally, there's the opensuse-packaging@ mailing list where you can get advice as well. [0] SUSE and Fedora seem to use the same menu system as specified at URL:http://www.freedesktop.org/. There's slight differences in _how_ you get the entries into the menu structure, but they're not significant. Mandriva uses a menu system based on, but not quite the same as that used by Debian. [1] SUSE defaults to putting package documents into /usr/share/doc/packages whereas Fedora puts them in /usr/share/doc. Since I don't have a Mandriva system I'm not sure where they put things. [2] Don't you just love standards. There's just so many you can choose from :-) Regards, David Bolt -- Member of Team Acorn checking nodes at 50 Mnodes/s: http://www.distributed.net/ AMD1800 1GB WinXP/SUSE 9.3 | AMD2400 256MB SuSE 9.3 | A3010 4MB RISCOS 3.11 AMD2600(64) 512MB SUSE 10.0 | AMD2400 768MB SUSE 10.0 | A4000 4MB RISCOS 3.11 AMD2800(64) 512MB SUSE 10.1 | RPC600 129MB RISCOS 3.6 | Falcon 14MB TOS 4.02

Marius Roets wrote:

Hi everybody, I have some question on creating RPM's for a Suse distribution. 1) Does Suse have a specific way of doing things? 2) If yes, is there a howto somewhere? 3) How do I test it without having a second clean system? 4) If I want to create rpm's for more than one Suse version, do I need to build it on each one? 5) And if I want to make distro independent (well suppose it's not completely possible) rpm? Any tips on doing that.

Thanks Marius

The info at this page may be helpful: http://en.opensuse.org/SUSE_Build_Tutorial I haven't read it all yet, but I remember it took me a while to find it in the abundance of info on the Open SuSE site. -- ED --