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✏️ Editing: spec

/*! \page specfile Spec file tags

A few additions have been made to the spec file format.

Name

The Name tag contains the proper name of the package. Names must not
include whitespace and may include a hyphen '-' (unlike version and release
tags). Names should not include any numeric operators ('<', '>','=') as
future versions of rpm may need to reserve characters other than '-'.

By default subpackages are named by prepending `\<main package\>-' to
the subpackage name(s). If you wish to change the name of a
subpackage (most commonly this is to change the '-' to '.'), then you
must specify the full name with the -n argument in the %package
definition:

\verbatim
	%package -n newname
\endverbatim

\section specfile_summary Summary: and Description: Tags

The Summary: tag should be use to give a short (50 char or so) summary
of the package.  Most package's Description: line should be changed to
a Summary: line.  The Description: tag is still supported but should
be changed to a "%description" entry similar to %package and %files.
At some point in the future support will be removed for "Description:".
As an example, this spec file fragment:

\verbatim
  Description: Screen drawing library
  Name: screenlib
  Version: 1.0

%package devel
  Description: Screen drawing library headers and static libs
\endverbatim

might be changed to:

\verbatim
  Summary: Screen drawing library
  Name: screenlib
  Version: 1.0

%description
  The screen drawing library
  is a handy development tool

%package devel
  Summary: Screen drawing library headers and static libs

%description devel
  This package contains all of the
  headers and the static libraries for
  screenlib.

You'll only need this package if you
  are doing development.
\endverbatim

The description is free form text, but there are two things to note.
The first regards reformatting.  Lines that begin with white space
are considered "pre-formatted" and will be left alone.  Adjacent
lines without leading whitespace are considered a single paragraph
and may be subject to formatting by glint or another RPM tool.

\section specfile_url URL: and Packager: Tags

Two new tags are "URL:" and "Packager:".  "URL:" is a place to put a
URL for more information and/or documentation on the software
contained in the package.  Some future RPM package tool may make use
of this.  The Packager: tag is meant to contain the name and email
address of the person who "maintains" the RPM package (which may be
different from the person who actually maintains the program the
package contains).

\section specfile_buildarchitectures BuildArchitectures: Tag

This tag specifies the architecture which the resulting binary package
will run on.  Typically this is a CPU architecture like sparc,
i386. The string 'noarch' is reserved for specifying that the
resulting binary package is platform independent.  Typical platform
independent packages are html, perl, python, java, and ps packages.

\section specfile_virtual Virtual File Attribute(s) in %files Section

A %ghost tag on a file indicates that this file is not to be included
in the package.  It is typically used when the attributes of the file
are important while the contents is not (e.g. a log file).

The %config(missingok) indicates that the file need not exist on the
installed machine. The %config(missingok) is frequently used for files
like /etc/rc.d/rc2.d/S55named where the (non-)existence of the symlink
is part of the configuration in %post, and the file may need to be
removed when this package is removed.  This file is not required to
exist at either install or uninstall time.

The %config(noreplace) indicates that the file in the package should
be installed with extension .rpmnew if there is already a modified file
with the same name on the installed machine.

The virtual file attribute token %verify tells `-V/--verify' to ignore
certain features on files which may be modified by (say) a postinstall
script so that false problems are not displayed during package verification.
\verbatim
	%verify(not size filedigest mtime) %{prefix}/bin/javaswarm
\endverbatim

\section specfile_globbing Shell Globbing of %files Section

The usual rules for shell globbing apply.  Most special characters can
be escaped by prefixing them with a '\'.  Spaces are used to separate
file names and so must be escaped by enclosing the file name with quotes.
For example:

\verbatim
	/tmp/are\.you\|bob\?
	/tmp/bob\'s\*htdocs\*
	"/tmp/bob\'s htdocs"
\endverbatim

Names containing "%%" will be rpm macro expanded into "%".  When
trying to escape large number of file names, it is often best to
create a file with the complete list of escaped file names.  This is 
easiest to do with a shell script like this:

\verbatim
	rm -f $RPM_BUILD_DIR/filelist.rpm 
	echo '%defattr(-,root,root)' >> $RPM_BUILD_DIR/filelist.rpm 
	find $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/%{_prefix} -type f -print | \
	    sed "s!$RPM_BUILD_ROOT!!" |  perl -pe 's/([?|*.\'"])/\\$1/g' \
		>> $RPM_BUILD_DIR/filelist.rpm

%files -f filelist.rpm
\endverbatim

\section specfile_automatic Fine Adjustment of Automatic Dependencies

Rpm currently supports separate "Autoreq:" and "Autoprov:" tags in a
spec file to independently control the running of find-requires and
find-provides. A common problem occurs when packaging a large third
party binary which has interfaces to other third party libraries you
do not own.  RPM will require all the third party libraries be
installed on the target machine even though their intended use was
optional. To rectify the situation you may turn off requirements when
building the package by putting

\verbatim
	Autoreq: 0 
\endverbatim

in your spec file. Any and all requirements should be added manually using the

\verbatim
	Requires: depend1, ..., dependN
\endverbatim

in this case.

Similarly there is an Autoprov tag to turn off the automatic provision
generation and a Autoreqprov to turn off both the automatic provides and
the automatic requires generation.

\section specfile_nosrc NoSource: Tag

Files ending in .nosrc.rpm are generally source RPM packages whose spec
files have one or more NoSource: or NoPatch: directives in them.  Both
directives use the named source or patch file to build the resulting
binary RPM package as usual, but they are not included in the source
RPM package.

The original intent of this ability of RPM was to allow proprietary or
non-distributable software to be built using RPM, but to keep the
proprietary or non-distributable parts out of the resulting source RPM
package, so that they would not get distributed.

They also have utility if you are building RPM packages for software
which is archived at a well-known location and does not require that
you distribute the source with the binary, for example, for an
organization's internal use, where storing large quantities of source
is not as meaningful.

The end result of all this, though, is that you can't rebuild
``no-source'' RPM packages using `rpm --rebuild' unless you also have
the sources or patches which are not included in the .nosrc.rpm.

\section specfile_buildrequires BuildRequires: Tag

Build dependencies are identical to install dependencies except:

\verbatim
  1) they are prefixed with build (e.g. BuildRequires: rather than Requires:)
  2) they are resolved before building rather than before installing.
\endverbatim

So, if you were to write a specfile for a package that requires egcs to build,
you would add
\verbatim
	BuildRequires: egcs
\endverbatim
to your spec file.

If your package was like dump and could not be built w/o a specific version of
the libraries to access an ext2 file system, you could express this as
\verbatim
	BuildRequires: e2fsprofs-devel = 1.17-1
\endverbatim

Finally, if your package used C++ and could not be built with gcc-2.7.2.1, you
can express this as
\verbatim
	BuildConflicts: gcc <= 2.7.2.1
\endverbatim

MR SKB