[PLUG] Making RPMs (and DEBs?) from source tarballs (2)

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Sat Oct 20 17:30:54 UTC 2007


On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

>I am running a RHEL clone, and occasionally I download a source tarball
>and compile and install it.  I would prefer to manage the new files with
>RPM, so I would like to build an RPM, and install from that - if it is
>easy.  Most source packages use GNU automake, with the usual mantra
>"./configure, make, make install", so I expect there is an automagic tool
>to build RPMs from such source packages (also DEBs for our Ubuntu
>buddies).

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 03:41:15PM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
>   When I ran Red Hat I used 'checkinstall' instead of 'make install.'
...

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 03:44:47PM -0700, Aaron Burt wrote:
> The "checkinstall" utility sounds exactly like what you're looking for.
...

Rich, Aaron, thanks!  checkinstall worked semi-perfectly.  I ran it first
on a build on system A, and it tried to include some extraneous files in
the RPM file (I suspect something else was simultaneously doing some kind
of update on A).  So I ran checkinstall on system B, and that built an
RPM file that works on both system A and system B.  Someday I will learn
the "proper" way to exclude extraneous files, but I got the job done.  

RPM normally keeps track of dependencies;  I wonder if the RPMs I am
building may fail on some versions of the distro with different packages
installed.  Perhaps I should do these builds on a minimal install inside
a virtual machine,  to keep track of the dependencies.

BTW, I used this to build 4.2.2 gnuplot, which is a great improvement on
the 4.0.0 that shipped with my distribution (Scientific Linux 5, a clone
of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5).  The RPM (which does not use libpdf and
does not provide direct PDF generation) is at:

   http://www.kl-ic.com/gnuplot-4.2.2-1.sl5.i386.rpm

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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