Fedora Linux

%clean

Commands to remove temporary files after a build.

%files

A list of the files that are to be included in the package.

%changelog

A history of package versions.

The %prep section might include all of the commands that would normally be used to prepare the package:

%prep
tar xvjf CriticalMass-1.0.0.tar.bz2
cd CriticalMass-1.0.0

However, since most open source packages use some simple variation of the same steps, Fedora's standard RPM setup includes a macro script to do this work for you. It's named %setup ; to use it, specify it as the only step in the %prep section of the spec file:

%prep
%setup

Similarly, the %build stage can use the predefined %configure macro to run ./configure before make is run:

%build
%configure
make %{_smp_mflags}

The %{_smp_mflags} macro, used as an argument to make , will contain the options required to configure the build process for a symmetric multiprocessor system with multiple CPUs if the package is being built on an SMP system. (For many applications, this will make no difference).

The %install section installs the filesnot into the final destination directories, but into the appropriate directories under the BuildRoot . In this case, since we've defined the BuildRoot as ~rpm/tmp/CriticalMass-root/ , files that would normally be installed into /usr/bin will be installed into ~rpm/tmp/CriticalMass- root/usr/bin .

There are two advantages to placing the files into the BuildRoot instead of the final file location: the Fedora system you're using won't get messed up, and since the only files that should be in the BuildRoot are those installed by this package, you can check to see that you can account for all of them.

The %install section often consists of an rm command to clear out the BuildRoot , followed by the %makeinstall macro to run make install with the appropriate options to install into BuildRoot instead of the root directory (most, but not all, modern open source packages will respect these options). The whole %install section looks like this:

%install
rm -rf %{buildroot}
%makeinstall

If you leave out the %check section (which is optional), the next section is %clean commands to clean up the BuildRoot . This is usually the same rm command that was used in the %install section:

%clean
rm -rf %{buildroot}

At this point, the whole spec file looks like this:

Name: CriticalMass
Version: 1.0.0
Release: 1
Group: Amusements/Games
Summary: An arcade-style shoot-em-up game.
License: GPL
Source0: CriticalMass-1.0.0.tar.bz2
URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/criticalmass
BuildRoot: %{_tmppath}/%{name}-root
%description
CriticalMass is an old-style arcade-style shoot-em-up game with
modern graphics and sound.
%prep
%setup
%build
%configure
make %{_smp_mflags}
%install
rm -rf %{buildroot}
%makeinstall
%clean
rm -rf %{buildroot}

This file is saved in ~/rpm/CriticalMass/CriticalMass.spec . Note that the %prep , %build , %install , and %clean sections are pretty generic and could be used with many different packages.

The next section required is a list of files to be included in the package. The easy way to prepare this list is to have rpmbuild the RPM package-building toolbuild the package and install it into the BuildRoot , and then see what's there:

$ cd ~/rpm/ CriticalMass
$ ls
CriticalMass-1.0.0.tar.bz2 CriticalMass.spec
$ rpmbuild -bi CriticalMass.spec
Executing(%prep): /bin/sh -e /home/chris/rpm/tmp/rpm-tmp.54511
+ umask 022