Hi, On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Jethro Cramp wrote:
Mandrake has a very active user contributed RPM compiling project. You only have to look on rpmfind.net and you can see that usually Mandrake has the most up-to-date RPM's available. It was whilst being involved in this that I learnt to make rpms from srcrpms using Mandrake's very clear HOW-TO.
Can you give me a pointer to that HOWTO? I would like to have a look at it.
SuSE does a wonderful job of making RPM's available to its' users for a wide range of programs. But this really isn't enough. Redhat based RPMs are ubiquitous. New users to SuSE all too easily can end up downloading the wrong RPM (witness Ron Sinclair's recent problem with quanta) and then get frustrated. To change this situation we all need to contribute by taking the miscellaneous RPMs that we build in the course of the daily use of our systems and upload them to rpmfind.net etc.
That would be fabulous :)
Of course sometimes because of the individual nature of everybody's systems someone is going to download an rpm and it isn't going to run; but that is still better than not having a suse rpm at all.
To make this work SuSE needs to take the initiative and write some guidelines for newbies to follow and publish this in a prominent position on their website, in the installed docs and in their manuals. I think that this would have a very positive effect on the useability and accessibility (excuse the marketing speak) of the SuSE distribution.
What does everybody else think?
You hit the nail right on the head - I agree that we have not been very active and encouraging in that respect so far. Even though creating RPMs for SuSE is in no way different than creating an RPM for other Distributions, there still are some things, that are not very well documented so far. The book "Maximum RPM at www.rpm.org is a good start. RPM in general is sparsely documented :( However, I am currently working on a HOWTO-style document, that is going to describe how to build RPMs using some of the SuSE special features like rc.config or init scripts. Stay tuned. LenZ -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Lenz Grimmer SuSE GmbH mailto:grimmer@suse.de Schanzaeckerstr. 10 http://www.suse.de/~grimmer/ 90443 Nuernberg, Germany Whip me. Beat me. Make me maintain AIX.