5.2 Creating RPM packages

The RPM format is used by many popular Linux distributions, including Red Hat, SuSE, and Mandrake. If one of these (or any of the other RPM-based Linux distributions) is your usual environment, creating RPM packages for other users of that same distribution is trivial. Depending on the complexity of your module distribution and differences between Linux distributions, you may also be able to create RPMs that work on different RPM-based distributions.

The usual way to create an RPM of your module distribution is to run the bdist_rpm command:

python setup.py bdist_rpm

python setup.py bdist --formats=rpm

The former allows you to specify RPM-specific options; the latter allows you to easily specify multiple formats in one run. If you need to do both, you can explicitly specify multiple bdist_* commands and their options:

python setup.py bdist_rpm --packager="John Doe <jdoe@example.org>" \
                bdist_wininst --target_version="2.0"

Creating RPM packages is driven by a .spec file, much as using the Distutils is driven by the setup script. To make your life easier, the bdist_rpm command normally creates a .spec file based on the information you supply in the setup script, on the command line, and in any Distutils configuration files. Various options and sections in the .spec file are derived from options in the setup script as follows:

RPM .spec file option or section	Distutils setup script option
Name	name
Summary (in preamble)	description
Version	version
Vendor	author and author_email, or & maintainer and maintainer_email
Copyright	licence
Url	url
%description (section)	long_description

Additionally, there many options in .spec files that don't have corresponding options in the setup script. Most of these are handled through options to the bdist_rpm command as follows:

RPM .spec file option or section	`bdist_rpm` option	default value
Release	release	``1''
Group	group	``Development/Libraries''
Vendor	vendor	(see above)
Packager	packager	(none)
Provides	provides	(none)
Requires	requires	(none)
Conflicts	conflicts	(none)
Obsoletes	obsoletes	(none)
Distribution	distribution_name	(none)
BuildRequires	build_requires	(none)
Icon	icon	(none)

Obviously, supplying even a few of these options on the command-line would be tedious and error-prone, so it's usually best to put them in the setup configuration file, setup.cfg--see section 3. If you distribute or package many Python module distributions, you might want to put options that apply to all of them in your personal Distutils configuration file (~/.pydistutils.cfg).

There are three steps to building a binary RPM package, all of which are handled automatically by the Distutils:

Normally, RPM bundles the last two steps together; when you use the Distutils, all three steps are typically bundled together.

If you wish, you can separate these three steps. You can use the --spec-only option to make bdist_rpm just create the .spec file and exit; in this case, the .spec file will be written to the ``distribution directory''--normally dist/, but customizable with the --dist-dir option. (Normally, the .spec file winds up deep in the ``build tree,'' in a temporary directory created by bdist_rpm.)