[Mailman-Users] Making an RPM

Todd Freedom_Lover at pobox.com
Mon Aug 4 16:56:41 CEST 2003


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Angel Gabriel wrote:
> I just wanted to find out if this is possible?

Possible, sure.  Worthwhile, maybe.  Depends on how many systems you have to
push out mailman installs to and how much you like using rpm to manage your
files.

> I want to download the latest source code for mailman, compile it, and
> then turn it into an RPM, so that I can install and remove it when
> neccessary. How would I go about doing this?

Have you ever built rpm's before?  If not, check some of the the docs on
rpm.org[1] for a starting point.  The other thing that's useful is checking
out someone else's source rpm to get an idea of what they had to do to get
things installed properly.  There is a redhat rpm in rawhide for 2.1.2 that
might get you started.  I haven't looked at it though, so I don't know what
it's like.

I've created rpms for my own systems since back in the 2.0.something days,
mainly so that I could get things working with postfix better out of the box
and so I could apply a few minor cosmetic tweaks to the code.  I don't think
it'll be very useful, but I did put the spec file and other source files on
the web a while back for someone else's reference.  Feel free to take a peek
at that, but don't complain to me if they don't work (though if you let me
know of a problem in them I'll fix it if it affects my systems).

    http://pobox.com/~tmz/RPMS/

IMO, Mailman is one of those packages that's harder to make an rpm of than
it is to just install from source, so weigh carefully your need/desire to
have an rpm.  I mostly started building the one's I've built just for the
hell of it.  I really had no pressing need for them, though it does save me
a little time futzing with config files after the install.  YMMV.

[1] http://rpm.org/howto/

One thing that's worth noting, in case it's not covered prominently in any
of the HOWTO's: don't build your rpm's as root!  You're asking for trouble
if you do, since part of the build process does a make install and if you're
root, you can easily overwrite your working install with a test build if
you're not careful.  It's much better to use a regular user account for
building, even though that sometimes has issues with some packages.

- -- 
Todd              OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xD654075A | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
============================================================================
Left to Her own devices, nature cures stupidity.

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