This chapter covers options for the rpmbuild command that allow you to achieve a finer grain of control over how the command works. For example, the --short-circuit option tells the rpmbuild command to build just the stages you ask for. This helps when you have problems in one area of building an RPM and don’t want to start over each time you try to see if the problem is solved.

The rpmbuild command also supports a set of -t options that work like the -b options, except the -t options try to build an RPM from a tar archive of sources (a tarball) instead of an RPM spec file. In this case, the rpmbuild command tries to work without a spec file.

The --rebuild option tells the rpmbuild command to install a source RPM, build the binary RPM, and clean out the installed source RPM. This provides quite a shortcut for installing binary RPMs from source RPMs.

RPMs should be signed to provide an extra level of authentication. This system isn’t perfect, but it helps you verify that a package is from the person it says it is from and that the package has not been modified. You can check the signature on RPM packages you download. You can also, with some configuration, sign the packages you create.