We have released a section of our courseware under a Creative Commons license that has very comprehensive coverage of building RPMs. It has treatment of the whole spectrum of issues including making proper patches, the freedesktop.org menu specification, and ancillary files like logrotate.d files, cron.*/ files, SysV init files along with chkconfig, etc. One unique thing about the guide is that it is not just a reference as it includes a very detailed (48 page) lab exercise that walks a would be packager through several real world scenarios including: * Setting up a build environment * Re-building an existing src.rpm * Updating a src.rpm with newer software release (and handling merged upstream patches) * Creating a spec file from scratch to package an application * Extending a spec file to break a single application into multiple logical packages * Setting up GnuPG and signing your packages The lab exercise has been validated and tested to "just work as written" on the following distributions: Fedora Core 3 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 SUSE Linux Professional 9.2 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 It will likely work, possibly with small modifications, on other RPM based distributions as well. The guide can be found under the "Goodies" section of our website here: http://www.gurulabs.com/goodies/guru+guides.php I'm excited to make this release and hope it is useful addition to the available RPM documentation and helps increase the amount of quality packagers and packages. Dax Kelson Guru Labs
