makerpm

What is it?

A clean, simple RPM packager reimplemented completely from scratch.

It converts a directory on disk into an installable binary RPM package.

Why?

RPM is a hoary beast with several problems:

• rpmbuild is a very complex and poorly documented program; learning to use it properly is time-consuming and expensive.
• rpmbuild imposes a certain development and build process, which might clash with your own in-house build process.
• rpmbuild is not stand-alone; it only comes as a part of the complete RPM package manager system.
• Installing and using rpmbuild on an OS that doesn't use RPM for package management is crufty and complicated.
• There is no independent implementation of the RPM package format, and coming to grips with the rpm source code is a monumental, impossible task.

Use cases for makerpm:

• For when you are compiling something on a system that doesn't use RPM but want to distribute the result in a convient RPM format.
• For the case when your build/continuous integration system doesn't work well with rpmbuild, but you still want the results as RPM packages.
• For quickly converting a package in some other format to an RPM package.
• For when you want to put together an RPM package without learning the intricacies of the whole rpmbuild process.
• For learning how the RPM format works.

Compiling

Download the source and compile. (A simple Makefile is provided.)

Prerequisites:

• A C++11 compiler. (gcc 4.6 or 4.7 should work fine.)
• libarchive
• libcrypto (from the OpenSSL libraries)
• zlib

(These libraries will be part of any modern Linux distribution. You probably don't even need to install anything to compile makerpm.)

Usage

makerpm <rpm properties file> <output RPM file> <path prefix> <list of files to package...>

where

• rpm properties file is a file listing RPM metadata properties. (See test.rpmprops for an example.)
• output RPM file is a filename for writing the resulting RPM package.
• path prefix is the prefix to strip from the paths of input files before packaging.
• list of files is the list of files on the local filesystem for packaging.

Alternatively, if file list is way too huge, you can use -i <files listing file> instead of explicit files list.

Example

Assume you have a directory tree that looks like this:

/home/user/package/usr/bin/myapp
/home/user/package/usr/bin/myapp.o
/home/user/package/usr/lib/libmyapp.so
/home/user/package/usr/local/share/docs/myapp-help.html

Running

makerpm myapp.props myapp.rpm /home/user/package 
  /home/user/package/usr/bin/myapp
  /home/user/package/usr/lib/libmyapp.so
  /home/user/package/usr/local/share/docs/myapp-help.html

will create an RPM package with the following files:

/usr/bin/myapp
/usr/lib/libmyapp.so
/usr/local/share/docs/myapp-help.html

NOTE: Only the files you pass directly to makerpm are packaged. /home/user/package/ is not scanned for files, and any extra files in that tree will be ignored. The 'path prefix' (/home/user/package) is only used for mangling the pathnames listed in the RPM package. It is not validated or used in any way for reading the data of the list of local files.

Caveat emptor

makerpm is not stable or well-tested software. It also has lots of limitations:

• makerpm is not a smart tool. It will not attempt to fix incorrectly-specified metadata, nor will it attempt to add dependencies automatically.
• 'Documentation' and 'config' flags for individual files are not supported.
• Lots and lots of other RPM features are not supported either.