Fedora packaging workshop

On 17th and 18th this month, we'll have a local Linux conference here. As part of this, I'll give a short introductory workshop on packaging. The following series of posts helps me, to sort things for me and to provide a short reference for others and myself as well.

Prerequisites

In order to package and build packages for Fedora and EPEL, you'll need a few packages installed

  • @development-tools
  • @fedora-packager
  • rpmlint

You'll install those packages via

dnf group install development-tools
dnf group install fedora-packager
dnf install rpmlint

You'll find several warnings about not to create packages as root user. Take them serious. There's absolutely no reason to build as root user, it's plainly risky and dumb to do so.

To separate your user account from the user building rpms a bit more, add a new user to your system:

useradd makerpm

Finally, your user account should become a member of mock user group.

usermod -a -G mock makerpm

The whole process is documented on Fedora Wiki.