RPM Packaging Guide

This is an RPM Packaging Guide.

Many of the guides I have found around the internet are either too detailed, not detailed enough, or are simply showing their age and contain old, incorrect or outdated information. My hope here is to provide a guide that can be maintained and expanded upon over time.

The document itself was originally written in sphinx-doc reStructuredText and was published at http://rpm-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

The document is now being converted to AsciiDoc and its draft is published at https://rpm-packaging-guide.github.io/. Note that this is a work in progress.

You can find the document topic pages in source in this git repository. The community and rhel directories contain index pages for an upstream community version and a RHEL 7 downstream version, respectively.

In order to render it, first make sure you have asciidoctor installed.

To render the community version, run:

asciidoctor community/index.adoc

To render the RHEL 7 version, run:

asciidoctor rhel/master.adoc

Publishing Mechanism

The publishing mechanism uses a single configuration file in .travis.yml and is based on a GitHub+Travis CI+Asciidoctor container+GitHub Pages toolchain, an idea taken from http://mgreau.com/asciidoc-to-ghpages/.

Each commit pushed to the publish branch automatically triggers a community version build, so you don't need an extra tool installed locally in order to publish an update to the document. When the Asciidoctor container running in Travis CI successfully finishes the build, Travis CI pushes the resulting HTML and PDF to a staging repo https://github.com/rpm-packaging-guide/rpm-packaging-guide.github.io, and GitHub Pages then publishes the HTML and PDF to https://rpm-packaging-guide.github.io/.

Licensing

To make licensing easier, license headers in the source files will be a single line reference to Unique License Identifiers as defined by the Linux Foundation's SPDX project.

For example, in a source file the full "GPL v2.0 or later" header text will be replaced by a single line:

SPDX-License-Identifier:    GPL-2.0+

Or alternatively, in a source file the full "CC-BY-SA-4.0" header text will be replaced by a single line:

SPDX-License-Identifier:    CC-BY-SA-4.0

the license terms of all files in the source tree should be defined by such License Identifiers; in no case a file can contain more than one such License Identifier list.

If a SPDX-License-Identifier: line references more than one Unique License Identifier, then this means that the respective file can be used under the terms of either of these licenses, i. e. with

SPDX-License-Identifier:    GPL-2.0+    LGPL-2.1+

All SPDX Unique License Identifiers available here.