Overview

RPM specs for binary distributions of some common packages.

RPMs are typically built from source and tailored to their particular distribution through RPM specs and packaging guidelines. Sometimes though, we're just looking for a way to control an entire binary distribution of a piece of software. We want something more controlled than untar'ing a tarball into a directory, but something less complicated than a distribution-specific collection of RPMs.

The spec files provided certainly don't meet any distribution's packaging guidelines that we're aware of, and are designed to be tailored for a particular environment. Don't need the documentation or the source code? Just %exclude the relevant directories.

-dist Suffix

We chose the suffix -dist to distinguish packages built from their binary distributions from the actual packages provided by OS vendors.

-common Packages

Many large Java programs may have a few native components that could be package separately from their architecture independent parts. Rather than repackage the entire Java program, we package the noarch parts (the majority of the package) into a -common package, put the native components their own architecture dependent packages, then make the architecture dependent packages depend on the common packages. This allows someone to get both the native and common parts by installing a single RPM.

RPATHs

Some pre-compiled libraries contain invalid RPATHs, which can cause the packaging process to fail. In those cases, we define QA_SKIP_RPATHS=2 from within the spec file to allow the packaging process to continue.

It would be preferable to use chrpath to remove rpaths from libraries, but that doesn't work when building for a target other than the native one (i.e. building for i686 on x86_64). Instead, redefine __arch_install_post to allow invalid rpaths. This is a hack in case the behavior of __arch_install_post ever changes in the future, but keeps us from having to define an environment variable external to rpmbuild. This results in the error "Too many levels of recursion in macro expansion. It is likely caused by recursive macro declaration.", but the build succeeds.

Build IDs

Some pre-compiled libraries are missing Build ID's, which can cause the packaging process to fail. In those cases, we undefine _missing_build_ids_terminate_build to allow the packaging process to continue.

Relocations

All of the provided specs build relocatable packages. Pass --prefix to rpm when installing to put the packages in the directory of your choice. By default, the packages are installed into /opt/package-version.

quickbuild

quickbuild is a tool to simplify building RPMs from the provided specs. In the simplest case, just provide a copy of distribution tarballs (with names matching the Source lines in the spec file) and quickbuild will create the correct rpmbuild directory structure, copy the spec and source into the right places, invoke rpmbuild, and copy the packaged artifacts to a destination directory.

Usage

quickbuild [-k] [-v] [-d DST] [-t TOPDIR] [-o OPT...] SPEC SOURCE...

Options

-k          keep rpmbuild directory
-v          make the rpmbuild command verbose
-d DST      copy RPMs into directory DST (default is .)
-t TOPDIR   use TOPDIR as rpmbuild directory instead of creating one
-o OPT      pass OPT to rpmbuild
-h          show help

Examples

Build jetty from the tarball jetty-distribution-9.1.0.v20131115.tar.gz:

quickbuild jetty9-dist.spec jetty-distribution-9.1.0.v20131115.tar.gz

Build Hadoop native components (which are distributed only in 32-bit) on a 64-bit host:

quickbuild -o "--target i686" hadoop2-dist-native.spec hadoop-2.2.0.tar.gz