The #rpm channel has this question this morning:
how can I simple include a file placed in SOURCES dir in a pkg?
Locally on a development box, I maintain a huge archive of unpacked .spec files, either written from scratch, or with automated tools locally produced in house, or extracted from SRPMs (from a mirror collection of somewhat over a quarter-million such SRPMs)
This gives me a huge reservoir to look through for a clean example. Folks in a Unix ™ like environment are fortunate to live in a culture what favors portability by rebuilding from sources, and avoiding binary data stores in favor of plain text ones. This has been a part of the environment since the earliest days of that culture. The tool grep can act as one's eyes, to scout out examples
I know from experience reading and then writing .spec files, that a file living in the ./SOURCES/ directory might be listed, and then referred to by using the identifier: SOURCE. So, I look with grep and find the following
[herrold@centos-5 ~]$ cd rpmbuild/SPECS/
[herrold@centos-5 SPECS]$ grep SOURCE *spec | wc
623 2876 44222
[herrold@centos-5 SPECS]$ grep SOURCE *spec | less As there were LOTS of matches, I used less to scan the results a screen at a time, looking for a well known, and readily available package to pull an example from. The ISC bind nameserver is a well known and prevasively available one
[herrold@centos-5 SPECS]$ grep -i SOURCE bind*spec | grep 29
Source29: named.conf.sample
cp -fp %{SOURCE29} sample/etc/named.conf
[herrold@centos-5 SPECS]$ grep -i sample bind*spec
Source29: named.conf.sample
Source30: named.rfc1912.zones.sample
# sample bind configuration files for %doc:
mkdir -p sample/etc sample/var/named/{data,slaves}
cp -fp %{SOURCE29} sample/etc/named.conf
cp -fp %{SOURCE30} sample/etc/named.rfc1912.zones
cp -fp %{SOURCE31} sample/etc/
cp -fp %{SOURCE17} %{SOURCE18} %{SOURCE19} %{SOURCE20} %{SOURCE21} %{SOURCE22} %{SOURCE23} sample/var/named
ns localhost.' > sample/var/named/$f;
/usr/bin/tail -n '+'`/bin/egrep -n '\\$Id: rndc.conf,v' bin/rndc/rndc.conf | sed 's/:.*$/+1/' | bc` bin/rndc/rndc.conf | sed '/Sample rndc configuration file./{p;i\
;d}' > sample/etc/rndc.conf;
%doc sample/
... So we see that the process is:
- List that file, living in ./SOURCES/ in the .spec file
- Simply use the cp command (with some options preserving timestamps, etc.) to the install staging point, and
- include the destination directory or the specific file in the list down in the %files stanza of the .spec file
By reading prior examples, a person can find both good and bad examples, of course, and so cross checking is sensible. This particular example was chosen as it is a nice clean one
This post is part of a continuing series. The content of this series might be indexed out with the tag: rpm It addresses usage questions and issues raised in the #rpm IRC channel on freenode. That channel is populated by folks who are part of the RPM branch represented at: http://rpm5.org/. Your author of this content formerly served as the editor of the RPM website, for many years, until the domain owner 'pulled' it back one day. The older content formerly at the old rpm.org site is now archived at: http://www.oldrpm.org/
