Linux packages the not so easy way

2004-09-08 11:26

Are you using a RPM or DEB based system? Are you using a program and can't find it in packaged form?

Are you tired of wondering what program you don't use anymore installed all that crap in /usr/local?

Then this article is for you. Learn how to create your own RPMs, that you can later uninstall, upgrade, and share with other computers and users, without much of a headache, thanks to checkinstall.

Andreas Simon / 2006-04-03 11:12:

Thanks, that was a very interesting reading. I'll give checkinstall a try this evening.

Boudewijn Rempt / 2006-04-03 11:13:

I thought I'd be able to use checkinstall to create preview packages of Krita, but I hadn't counted on the dependencies on the KOffice libs -- for which Krita needs the CVS version. And to produce an rpm of all of KOffice just to be able to show people Krita is a bit much. Besides, it'll break their installation.

Still, it's cool thing, this checkinstall.

Roberto Alsina / 2006-04-03 11:14:

Boudewijn: yeah, it gets tricky when you require things that are not packaged themselves.

AdamW / 2006-04-03 11:14:

also, checkinstall isn't likely to build RPMs that meet any distro's RPM guidelines, so it's not the best way to build packages you intend to distribute widely.

Roberto Alsina / 2006-04-03 11:15:

Well, for starters there's that problem of there not being a src.rpm, sure.

But if you take a little care of where stuff gets installed, they are just fine.

Michael Shigorin / 2006-04-03 11:28:

> Sure, making a package is not terribly hard.

> It's just that I have no idea how it's done.

Ugh. And you, while understanding the time essence, invest your time in checkinstall and friends and not into finding simple enough rpm spec intro?

It's *soooo* frustrating I can't believe that :-(

--

mike,

who uses far more potent (rpm/apt-based) tools

available in ALT Linux to create, maintain and QA

the packages needed (and their dependencies too)

Roberto Alsina / 2006-04-03 11:28:

Well, I tried one thing first, and since it worked, I didn't try another one ;-)

I understand that learning to do specs would be better, yeah. However, for some reason I don't feel a desire to try.

Maybe later.

dave / 2006-04-03 14:30:

I could not find the checkinstall fc2 rpm the download link returned an error 404. Is there a new ulr for it?

dez / 2006-04-03 15:18:

Having installed checkinstall newest beta, I get a recurse dirs error when running checkinstall make install on all progs i try to compile.

Have you come across this before?

I am using Fc3 and checkinstall latest beta 1.6.0

Roberto Alsina / 2006-04-03 15:20:

Looks like freecache sucks. Get it from here:

http://lateral.pycs.net/static/checkinstall-1.6.0beta3-1.i386.rpm

Roberto Alsina / 2006-04-03 15:20:

Looks like freecache is dead. You can get it directly from pycs:

http://lateral.pycs.net/static/checkinstall-1.6.0beta3-1.i386.rpm

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