[mdlug] Chaning distros

[David Relson]

On Mon, 8 Jan 2007 12:01:46 -0500
Dan Pritts wrote:

> It is certainly possible - that's how you get SRPMs in the first
> place.  It's just more work, and it's a *lot* of work to do it for an
> entire distribution from the original source tarballs.
> 
> My point is this: Red Hat is making it pretty easy for the Centos
> people to do what they do.  They could make it a bunch harder,
> without violating the GPL.

I do just that when I release a new version of bogofilter.  The
makefile has a "dist" target which builds tarballs (.tar.gz
and .tar.bz2 files) and an "rpm" target which uses "dist" (for the
tarballs) to create a src.rpm and then builds the binary rpm.  The
process a while since consistency checks are run (the "check" target)
and several binary rpms are built (for 2 databases and for both static
and shared libraries).  The heart of the process is the "spec" file
which specifies options, other packages (rpms) needed, etc, etc.
Without the spec file, converting a tarball into an rpm gives an rpm
that will have problems (as it lacks dependency info).