Appendix E

RPM Resources

Copyright (c) 2005 by Eric Foster-Johnson. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).

In This Appendix

*	Finding RPM sites on the Internet

*	Accessing RPM newsgroups and mailing lists

This appendix covers the material available on the Internet for working with RPM.

Finding RPM Sites

There is a wealth of RPM material online, although some of it is hard to find. The following sections list a number of RPM-related sites, divided by category. Note that as with any Internet sites, the sites listed my change or disappear.

The main rpm.org site

The main RPM site is www.rpm.org. This site provides the official distributions of the RPM software, as well as a lot of documentation online.

Table F-1 lists a number of useful links on this site.

Table F-1 Links on the rpm.org site

Link	Holds
ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/dist/	RPM software downloads
ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/	rpm.org download site
www.rpm.org/cvs_help/	Instructions for accessing the RPM CVS repository
www.rpm.org/hintskinks/	Tips for working with RPM
www.rpm.org/hintskinks/bootstrap/	Good tips on bootstrapping RPM to new platforms
www.rpm.org/howto/	How-to documents for working with RPM
www.rpm.org/max-rpm/	Maximum RPM by Edward C. Bailey
www.rpm.org/RPM-HOWTO/	Good introductory tutorial
www.rpm.org/rpmapi-4.1/	API documentation

The main RPM FTP site, at ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/, includes the RPM distributions, as well as the Berkeley DB version 3 library, and the text of the book Maximum RPM. Download RPM software from ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/dist/.

RPM locator sites

A number of sites help you find RPMs for various applications. On the main sites, you can find specially built RPMs for a variety of Linux distributions. You can then download the RPMs made especially for your systems.

The main RPM-finding site is rpmfind.net, which offers a search engine as well as software you can run on your site.

The RPM PBone Search, at http://rpm.pbone.net/, is also very useful.

The www.rpm.org/packagers/ site lists a number of places that package RPMs and provide them for downloading.

Many Java libraries and packages are available in RPM format from www.jpackage.org/.

Table F-2 lists a number of other RPM download sites.

Table F-2 RPM download sites

Site	Holds
rpmfind.net	Links to a huge number of RPMs, many specific to various Linux distributions
http://rpm.pbone.net/	RPM PBone search, useful for finding RPMs
www.rpm.org/packagers/	Lists a number of sites that provide RPMs for download
www.javapackage.org	Many Java packages in RPM format
http://plf.zarb.org/	The Penguin Liberation Front has RPMs that for legal reasons cannot be included in the Mandrake Linux distribution.
www.math.unl.edu/~rdieter/Projects	Rex Dieter’s RPM site
www.rpmhelp.net	Mandrake Linux RPMs
www.aucs.org/rpmcenter/	Edwin Chan's Red Hat RPMs
www.owlriver.com/projects/links/	Owl River Company RPMs

RPM tools sites

A large number of tools exist to help you work with RPMs. The following sites list some of the main tools:

*	For the vim text editor, you can download a spec.vim syntax file from http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/vim/syntax/spec.vim.

*	For emacs, you can download an Emacs mode for spec files from http://tihlde.org/~stigb/rpm-spec-mode.el.

Cross Reference

Appendix F lists links for a number of text editors.

*	The rpmlint tool mentioned in Chapter 13 is available at http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~flepied/projects/rpmlint/.

Table F-3 lists a number of RPM-related tools and the sites you can find more information on the tools.

Table F-3 RPM-related tools

Tool	Site
apt-rpm	ftp://ftp.conectiva.com/pub/conectiva/EXPERIMENTAL/apt/
apt4rpm	http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net/
AutoRPM	www.autorpm.org
AutoUpdate	www.mat.univie.ac.at/~gerald/ftp/autoupdate
current	www.biology.duke.edu/computer/unix/current/
kpackage	www.kde.org
MakeRPM.pl	www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-authors/id/JWIED
poldek	http://poldek.pld.org.pl/
rpm2html	rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/
rpmfind	rpmfind.net
RUST	www.rusthq.com
setup.sh	www.mmedia.is/~bre/programs/setup.sh
urpmi	www.linux-mandrake.com/cooker/urpmi.html

Programming sites

Only a few sites exist to help developers with programming for RPM. I maintain some quick links to RPM sites at www.pconline.com/~erc/rpm.htm. Most of these links are focused for programming with RPM.

The best sites for programming RPM are the online API documentation at www.rpm.org/rpmapi-4.1/ for the RPM 4.1 release, and the ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/dist/ site for downloading the RPM sources. There is a lot of documentation bundled with the source code.

Cross Reference

Appendix F lists links for a number of Integrated Development Environments, or IDEs, aimed at programmers.

Sites related to RPM

If you try to make cross-platform RPMs, especially RPMs that should work for multiple versions of Linux, it is very important to follow the Linux standards for things like file placement and package formats.

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, or FHS, covers Linux directory layout at www.pathname.com/fhs/.

The Linux Standards Base is working on standardizing on the RPM package file format. See www.linuxbase.org for details.

Accessing RPM Mailing Lists and Newsgroups

The RPM mailing list provides the best source of technical RPM information. You can post questions and get quick, useful responses. If you are working with RPM, you should subscribe to this mailing list. For details on viewing the RPM mailing list archives and signing up for the list, see www.rpm.org/mailing_list/.

To help avoid unwanted commercial e-mail (in other words, spam), you need to register with a user name and password to subscribe to the mailing list or view the archives.

A Usenet newsgroup, named linux.redhat.rpm, also provides a forum for asking RPM-related questions. You can read this newsgroup with any newsreading program.

Appendix E

Chris Ricker

2003-01-24T08:40:00

Eric Foster-Johnson