Building RPM from source tarball

It is possible to build directly from a source tarball if it contains a valid spec file.

Initial Setup

Before you can run rpmbuild, you need to setup a directory tree and a .rpmmacros file.

Full directions here

Building the RPM

You can kick off the rpmbuild anywhere; the tarball will be unpacked and built in your rpmbuild directory described in the previous section.

rpmbuild -tb your-tarball.tar.bz2

Some packages take quite a while to build.

Harvesting the Binary RPM

When the build completes, the binary rpms are deposited in rpm/RPMS.

ls -lart ${HOME}/rpm/RPMS

Enjoy!