Knowledge Base (Posts about rpmbuild)

Using date in rpm macro

bgstack15 — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 12:44:25 GMT

When you are building an rpm, and you want to use the date as a variable, or macro, you might already know about the percent-parenthesis syntax.

%define use_date %(date "+%F")

What took me a long time to remember is that you have to use percent percent when you want a literal percent sign.

%define use_date %( date "+%%Y%%m%%d" )

Also, you cannot use dashes (2020-09-29) in a version of a package. Use the %%Y%%m%%d for the 20200929 format! Source: https://rpm.org/user_doc/macros.html

Install build dependencies from source files, dpkg and rpm

bgstack15 — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 13:41:47 GMT

For a dpkg

cd $packagedir ;
mk-build-deps
sudo apt-get install ./${package}-build-deps*.deb

Source: ubuntu - Given a debian source package - How do I install the build- deps? - Server Fault

For an rpm

yum-builddep my-package.spec

dnf builddep my-package.spec

fedora - Automatically install build dependencies prior to building an RPM package - Stack Overflow/13228992#13228992

Which is more common for package name: -doc or -docs

bgstack15 — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 01:35:57 GMT

For a package that contains the documents for a larger package foo, should you name it foo-doc or foo-docs?

fedora-30$ sudo dnf list | grep -oE -e '-docs?' | sort | uniq -c
   4796 -doc
    172 -docs



devuan-ceres$ apt-cache search doc | grep -oE -e '-docs?' | sort | uniq -c
   4341 -doc
     81 -docs

Which is close to the ratio I was expecting! Now we know for sure though.

tasks for rpm %post scriptlet

bgstack15 — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 14:08:09 GMT

This is a notes post, where I store info mostly for myself regarding my best practices. From approximately 2018-02: Order of operations for rpm spec %pre,%post scripts: 1. icons 2. desktop files 3. Mimetypes 4. systemd units/system services