This is an RPM Packaging Guide.
Many of the guides I have found around the internet are either too detailed, not detailed enough, or are simply showing their age and contain old, incorrect or outdated information. My hope here is to provide a guide that can be maintained and expanded upon over time.
The document itself was originally written in sphinx-doc reStructuredText and was published at http://rpm-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.
Later, the document was converted to AsciiDoc and is published at https://rpm-packaging-guide.github.io/.
You can find the document topic pages in the source directory in this Git
repository. The community and rhel directories contain index pages for an
upstream community version and a RHEL downstream version, respectively.
In order to render it, first make sure you have asciidoctor installed.
To render the community version, run:
asciidoctor community/index.adoc
To render the RHEL version, run:
asciidoctor rhel/master.adoc
The publishing mechanism uses two configuration files
.github/workflows/asciidoc.sh and .github/workflows/ci.yml
and is based on GitHub Actions
https://github.com/marketplace/actions/convert-asciidoctor-docker-action
and https://github.com/marketplace/actions/push-directory-to-another-repository.
Each commit pushed to the master branch automatically triggers a community
version build, so you don't need an extra tool installed locally in order to
publish and update the document. GitHub Actions push the built HTML and PDF to a
staging repository
https://github.com/rpm-packaging-guide/rpm-packaging-guide.github.io,
and GitHub Pages then publishes the HTML and PDF to
https://rpm-packaging-guide.github.io/
and https://rpm-packaging-guide.github.io/rpm-packaging-guide.pdf.
To make licensing easier, license headers in the source files will be a single line reference to Unique License Identifiers as defined by the Linux Foundation's SPDX project.
For example, in a source file the full "GPL v2.0 or later" header text will be replaced by a single line:
SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
Or alternatively, in a source file the full "CC-BY-SA-4.0" header text will be replaced by a single line:
SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-4.0
the license terms of all files in the source tree should be defined by such License Identifiers; in no case a file can contain more than one such License Identifier list.
If a SPDX-License-Identifier: line references more than one Unique
License Identifier, then this means that the respective file can be
used under the terms of either of these licenses, i. e. with
SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+ LGPL-2.1+
All SPDX Unique License Identifiers available here.