Packaging madagascar

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There are many benefits to managing your software through the standard packaging system for your platform. This page is written for the benefit of:

  • future madagascar developers who want to prepare packages for distribution
  • system administrators who need to do their own packaging, such as for the purpose of easy, customized software management over a large number of machines

RPM

To make the RPMs, it is a good idea to first create a user just for this, i.e. makerpm. Then, install dependencies and set up. As root:

<bash> yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools" yum -y install rpmdevtools rpmlint </bash>

Log in as makerpm. Type: rpmdev-setuptree to create the ~/rpmbuild directory. Place the spec file in ~/rpmbuild/SPECS , then cd to that directory and run:

<bash> rpmbuild -ba m8r-fedora12-x86_64.spec </bash>

If you want a log of the entire process, use something like:

<bash> rpmbuild -ba madagascar.spec |& tee ~/log_rpm.asc </bash>

If you want to make other RPM files, you may find useful to run

<bash> rpmlint yourfile.spec </bash>

Some warnings are OK. If you want to debug your experiments, you can comment the contents of the prep, build or clean sections in the spec file. For prep and build, you must have executed it uncommented at least once.

You may be able to QC the build with mock. For this, run as root:

<bash> yum -y install mock useradd -G mock makerpm </bash>

Then run it with mock -r fedora-12-x86_64 rebuild path_to_source_RPM .

Fedora's guide to creating RPM packages constitutes excellent further reading on the topic of making RPMs.

Creating yum repositories for RPMs

As root: <bash> yum -y install createrepo </bash> Make the repo directory, i.e. <bash> mkdir -p /var/$USER/repo/Fedora/12/{SRPMS,x86_64} </bash> You may have RPMs for more architectures, for other versions, for other distros... make directories as needed.

Copy your RPMs in the appropriate directories, then in each directory (in this case, SRPMS and x86_64), run <bash> createrepo . </bash> Tarball the whole repo directory and upload it to your web host, then unpack it there in the desired location.

Create a madagascar.repo file with contents like this one, then instruct the users to copy the file to /etc/yum.repos.d if they want to enable this repository, i.e.: <bash> su cd /etc/yum.repos.d wget http://reproducibility.org/yum/madagascar.repo </bash>

Creating a Fedora Live CD/DVD

A Live medium is a CD, DVD or USB drive that contains an entire bootable operating system, often customized to contain certain packages. This allows users to try software without actually installing it on their machines, and demos and classes to be given using the students' own laptops, but not installing anything on them.

To create a Live CD with a minimal version of the Fedora 13 64-bit XFCE desktop and with madagascar and its dependencies, just burn to a DVD this image.

This image was created by installing Fedora 13 x86_64 on a machine. The host machine does not have to run the same desktop environment, or have package selection as the Live CD. Then, the commands below were run as root: <bash>

  1. Install dependencies:

yum -y install livecd-tools system-config-kickstart spin-kickstarts

  1. Set SELinux to permissive mode:

setenforce 0

  1. Make the Live DVD:

livecd-creator -f m8rFedoraLive -c fedora-live-m8r.ks </bash> The kickstart file (fedora-live-m8r.ks) can be found under version control in the SVN repository. This will create a 767Mib image that has a web browser and code editor installed, as well as the madagascar RPM and its dependencies, but not much else in terms of graphical user applications. Through additional tweaking of the install file, it should be possible to eventually bring the size of the image down to where it can be writtten on a CD instead of a DVD.