rpmbuild – a quick review

Last Update: 10/12/2024

The purpose of this post will to perform a quick review of rpmbuild. rpmbuild is a fundamental tool used to compile and package a rpm from source material.

This can can be a simple process. Having said that there are a number of items that can complicate an otherwise simple process. There are a number of other posts (not listed here) that should be reviewed. Those posts would discuss the rpm command; install gcc

INSTALLING

In SUSE this should be as simple as typing

zypper install rpmdevtools

In a perfect world it would be as simple as that.

SETING UP THE RPMBUILD ENVIRONMENT

This is an important step. The RPMBUILD environment is constructed by the creation of a few directectories and establishing a macros file.

rpmdev-setuptree

The above will set up “rpmbuild” directory and additional subdirectories.

localhost:~ # tree rpmbuild
rpmbuild
├── BUILD
├── BUILDROOT
├── RPMS
├── SOURCES
├── SPECS
└── SRPMS

The .rpmmacros file is created in the root directory of the user account.

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   228 Oct 12 12:09 .rpmmacros

Besides the rpmbuild structure there is one other item that is setup by this process. a .rpmmacros file gets setup in the root directory. [sigh] live with it. Apparently this is used to setup the macro structure which contributes … well to a lot of the shortcut macros that is regularly used {_topdir etc }

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