Customizing the RPMs from pgrpms.org

To pick up where Devrim left off in customizing RPMs, here are some more tips for getting your very own RPMs built:

  • Create a VM with your favorite operating system (I’m using versions of CentOS). I need both 32-bit OS and 64-bit OS. This is much easier to manage with separate, local VMs.
  • Install spectool (available here), and SVN
  • The other dependancies were: gcc glibc-devel bison flex python-devel tcl-devel readline-devel zlib-devel openssl-devel krb5-devel e2fsprocs-devel libxml2-devel libxslt-devel pam-devel
  • Edit the postgresql-$VERSION.spec file to your liking: If you’re adding patches, you need to add them in TWO places – first in the Patch#: group, and then again below where the %patch# series starts. Finally, if you’re adding an entirely new package (say in 8.2, pg_standby in contrib), you’ll need to also add the binary (or library, or whatever) to the appropriate %files clause later in the spec file. It’s also a good idea to modify ‘Release’. Here’s a sample diff of my spec file:


--- postgresql-8.2.spec (revision 188)
+++ postgresql-8.2.spec (working copy)
@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@
Summary: PostgreSQL client programs and libraries
Name: postgresql
Version: 8.2.17
-Release: 1PGDG%{?dist}
+Release: 1test%{?dist}
License: BSD
Group: Applications/Databases
Url: http://www.postgresql.org/
@@ -95,7 +95,9 @@
Patch4: postgresql-test.patch
Patch6: postgresql-perl-rpath.patch
Patch8: postgresql-prefer-ncurses.patch
+Patch7: postgresql-pgstat-dir.patch
Patch9: postgresql-use-zoneinfo.patch
+Patch10: pg_standby.patch

Buildrequires: perl glibc-devel bison flex
Requires: /sbin/ldconfig initscripts
@@ -282,7 +284,9 @@
%patch4 -p1
%patch6 -p1
%patch8 -p1
+%patch7 -p1
%patch9 -p1
+%patch10 -p1

pushd doc
tar -zcf postgres.tar.gz *.html stylesheet.css
@@ -604,6 +608,7 @@
%{_bindir}/pg_controldata
%{_bindir}/pg_ctl
%{_bindir}/pg_resetxlog
+%{_bindir}/pg_standby
%{_bindir}/postgres
%{_bindir}/postmaster
%{_mandir}/man1/initdb.*

How have you customized RPMs using this repo? Share your .spec files!