Re: compiling from tarballs

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc cu-portland edu>]

Rebecca Ore wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Jan 02, 2000 at 08:03:45AM -0600, Data Zone wrote:
> >
> > Actually, building rpms from tarballs is easy as pie, as long as a spec
> > file is included in the tarball, and its not broken.  all you have to do
> >
> > is: "rpm -tb tarball-name.version.tar.gz"
> > that should run for a bit then make a rpm or rpms in
> > /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386, or similar.
> > Make sure you are root when you do this, and you have all the necessary
> > development packages installed.  If you get any errors, just untar the
> > tarball, edit the spec file to fix it, then tar it up again, and try
> > building again.
> 
> I'd like to see all the steps because I've tried this a couple of times and
> simply didn't get a rpm in the end.  The spec file was for gnome-core-1.0.54
> and the tarball was from the ftp.gnome.org site.

Those are all the steps.  :)

> 
> I ended up just installing the thing from the make directory, I believe.
> 
> >
> > If you have any problems, let me know, i can post the rpms for those
> > packages on my site for you.
> 
> Better we should learn how to do this.  I'm using RH 6.1 with most upgrades.

You'll need to unset the LINGUAS environmental variable before you can
compile tarballs into RPMs.  For some reason unbeknowst to the rest of
the world, RedHat felt that they needed to set this variable and make
life more dificult.  You'll need to read the last 15+ lines of output
from 'rpm -tb gnome-core-1.0.54.tar.gz' to find the error, or a line
that reads something like 'wrote
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/gnome-core-1.0.54-1.i386.rpm'.
	Greg

P.S.  If I write up a nice question and answer for this, who do I need
to send it to so that it gets to be part of the FAQ?