[TriLUG] Rolling Your Own RPM 101

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

On Mon, 2002-11-11 at 12:05, Sinner from the Prairy wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-11-11 at 11:39, Lisa C. Boyd wrote:
> > Tanner has volunteered to teach a "Rolling Your Own RPM 101 (with
> > special emphasis on the spec file)" class. I also see Sinner has posted
> > some instructions that he uses. So who's interested in a class?
> 
> I'm interested in it. I also can give a fast presentation on the
> 7-Steps-HOWTO, or translate the article into English.
> 
> This is a quick'n'dirty way for rolling out the needed RPMs ASAP. It
> works pretty well. And it's RPM/DEB/TGZ friendly, for all the
> debian/slackware guys out there  :)

While this generally works well, it breaks down as you go into larger
and more complicated applications.

I would argue against giving a teaching class utilizing this
methodology, becuase you don't really learn how to write an RPM spec
file, or anything about the way RPM works. 

There was recently a fervent discussion on another mailing list about
the best way to teach HTML programming to young children, and it broke
out into two groups:
- The GUI way: Using Dreamweaver type programs do generate HTML in a
WYSIWYG fashion
- The manual way: Teaching HTML tags, then showing them their results in
a browser.

I think in the case of RPM (and since I think all of you are older than
1st graders) the latter approach is more appropriate, especially in an
indepth session. The whole "Give a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach
a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime" analogy comes to mind.

Of course, no offense to you Sinner, but tool reliance in programming
limits the possibilities of the end result to the boundaries of the
tool. I think that focusing the talk on manual RPM creation, and then
mentioning apps like checkinstall, alien, etc as an afternote would be
more in line for a successful class. My biggest worry is that someone
would walk away from the class unable to write an RPM spec without
checkinstall.

And yes, since I've jumped in with both feet on this, I'd be happy to
help out on this class, having built quite a few RPMS myself.

~spot
---
Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> Red Hat Sales Engineer
Sair Linux and GNU Certified Administrator (LCA)
Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
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