Re: packaging, tarballs, rpms: a quick howto?

[Gleef <gleef capital net>]

On Sun, 24 Jan 1999, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> Quite simply, I now have what I believe to be the stablest Gnome desktop
> I have yet to compile (which I am doing from CVS).  Great work to all
> involved!
> 
> I want to roll what I have up, primarily for safekeeping.  If I get
> something too unstable in the future I can go back to what I've got.  I
> also would like to put exactly what I am running on a couple of other
> machines.

Good idea.


> So how can I easily make tarballs, or even RPMs out of my binaries (and
> libraries of course)?  I mean I know how to make tarballs, what I want
> to know more specifically is what is the easiest way to get a catalog of
> what files to add to what tarballs?  How does gnome.org make the
> tarballs they are distributing? 

To make the tarball, after running "./autogen.sh", you run "make dist",
that will give you a tarball based on your current configuration.


>  How 'bout the RPMs?

Look in the top of each source directory, you will see a file called
"<package>.spec".  When you ran autogen.sh, you probably used a prefix
option.  Unless you used --prefix=/usr, change the prefix line in the spec
file.  If you didn't use a prefix option, change the prefix line in the
spec file to "/usr/local".  You then use "make dist" as above to give you
the tarball.  You then can run "rpm -ta <tarball>.tar.gz" to create binary
and source RPMs from the tarball.

Disclaimer, this is theoretical, I haven't actually gone through this
process.


> I saw some messages in the archive with regard to "make dist", and I
> have tried that in both glib and gtk+ and both bombed out, both while
> trying to make docs actually.  make dist in glib complained about a
> missing texinfo.tex file and make dist in gtk+ complained about missing
> a missing .gif file, but I can see from the Makefile that there should
> be an html subdir in there and it's not.

The glib and gtk+ packages are really just mirrors of development going on
elsewhere, they are managed by the GTK+ team, not the GNOME team.  You
could submit patches to them, but you could also probably just grab their
official tarball release that corresponds to your CVS version.

 
> Am I going to have this trouble trying to make tarballs of all of the
> modules that I have?

The GNOME ones _should_ work.  That doesn't necessarily mean they will
work, but if they don't, please send in bug reports (or even better,
patches).

Best of Luck,
-Gleef