<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>rpmmon-tut</title>
<link rev="made" href="mailto:gc at mandranokespamsoft dot com" />
<meta name="keywords" content="rpm, build, rpmlint, maintainer, quality" />
<meta name="description" content="The rpmmon project" />
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" link="#0000ee" vlink="#551a8b">
<h1 align="center">rpmmon-tut</h1>
<hr />
<h2>Purpose</h2>
<p>
In order to produce a quality Gnu/Linux distribution based on <a
href="http://www.rpm.org/">RPM</a>, you need some tools which will
facilitate the maintainance of the RPM packages you are maintainer
of. This is the aim of `rpmmon'.
</p>
<p>
For that purpose, the first task performed by rpmmon is to
monitor what has been announced on <a
href="http://freshmeat.net/">Freshmeat</a>, and try to guess if
the package in the distro you're developing is older.
</p>
<p>
Later on, this tool has grown to support additional features:
</p>
<ul>
<li>get the list of packages you're responsible for, either
in a static oriented way (a local file) or more dynamically (an
URL, for example the results of a CGI script from the QA of your
distro's company)</li>
<li>hence, provide an easy (e.g. command-line) interface to
quickly know who's maintainer of a given package</li>
<li>reversely, provide an easy interface to know what packages a
given person is responsible for</li>
<li>try to find automatically on Freshmeat the good project page
going along a given RPM package</li>
<li>runs <a href="http://www.lepied.com/rpmlint/">rpmlint</a> on
your packages (rpmlint is a rpm correctness checker)</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2>Short tutorial</h2>
<p>
`rpmmon' is a Perl script you will run on your command-line. You
may get the latest version <a
href="../resource/rpmmon.pl">here</a>.
</p>
<p>
Ok, once installed on
your system, try to run it:
</p>
<pre>
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl
<rpmmon> v0.4.0 helps you build better RPMs.
By Guillaume Cottenceau <gc at mandrakesoft dot com>.
Copyright (c) 2000-2001 by MandrakeSoft.
This is free software under the GPL License.
Usage: rpmmon <mode> [options]
modes:
-c check
-l <who> lint
-b <who> build
-a all
-m <mount_point> mountpoint
-p <package_name> package maintainer
-q <who> query
-Q <who> Query
-M maintainers
-u unmaintained
-t <url_maints> maints source
-v version
-h help
options:
-s source
-i info
-V verbose
-r <rc_file> use an alternate rc file
<<< Use option -h for more details. >>>
</pre>
<hr />
<p>
Of course, you will want to run the <b>-c</b> option to perform
the check.
</p>
<pre>
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -c
First, you need to define one mount point for your Development branch.
This is the directory where the hottest RPM's of your distrib sit, on
your local system (called Cooker in Mandrake, Rawhide in RedHat). It must
be a local filesystem. (therefore, it can be NFS, for example)
Use option -m <mount-point>.
That's only needed one time per mountpoint, and allows to specify
multiple mountpoints (for example if you want to add contrib).
Exiting on failure.
</pre>
<hr />
<p>
As explained, you need to indicate to the program where it can
find the RPM's. This is where the files will be found later on, to
perform the lint or other operations. Let's try to give it our
local mirror of Rawhide, the development version of RedHat Linux,
with the option <b>`-m'</b>.
</p>
<pre>
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -m /rawhide/RPMS/
Adding mount-point in rcfile being: '/rawhide/RPMS/' (if not duplicate)
You know have:
/rawhide/RPMS
Opening directory /rawhide/RPMS to get the packages filenames...found 992 files.
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -c
No package to mon. You should use option '-b' to build the database.
Exiting on failure.
</pre>
<p>
This has been saved in the rcfile, <tt>~/.rpmmonrc</tt>.
</p>
<p>
Note that you may have multiple mount points, that's why it showed
you the list of the set up mount-points. This is useful if you have
several directories containing the RPM's, for example the
"main" location, and the "contrib" (or
"powertools") location.
</p>
<hr />
<p>
As explained again, you still lack the database; this database
will make the correspondance between each package name and the
relevant Freshmeat project page. You can enter it manually, but of
course this wouldn't be fun if our script would not try to be
clever and save us some time. Hence the <b>`-b'</b> option.
</p>
<pre>
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -b gc
Packages for gc are:
libclanlib0-gl
mkinitrd
nil
gtktalog
SimGear-devel
gnuplot
[...]
Contacting host freshmeat.net several times to find entries in their database.
package `libclanlib0-gl'
-- 0 projects found --
package `mkinitrd'
-- 0 projects found --
package `nil'
Directly exists as /projects/nil
package `gtktalog'
Directly exists as /projects/gtktalog
package `SimGear-devel'
-- 0 projects found --
package `gnuplot'
Directly exists as /projects/gnuplot
package `penguin-command'
-- 0 projects found --
[...]
</pre>
<p>
I voluntarily shortened up the list shown upper; but it may be a
bit long if you're maintainer of a large bunch of packages. Of
course, the script will fail on packages that are not listed on
freshmeat, or when the names are too different. In such a case,
you may edit by hand the <tt>~/.rpmmonrc</tt> file to add the
missing locations, if you wish.
</p>
<hr />
<p>
Let's note that the default location to grab the correspondance
between you and the packages you're responsible for, is the
world-wide encrypted URL giving package maintainers for the
Mandrake Linux distribution. You may change it (it will be saved
as well, inside the rcfile, of course) with the <b>-t</b> option:
</p>
<pre>
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -t /tmp/maints.list
Setting the source for maintainers elsewhere. You can provide
a normal URL (http://..), an encrypted URL (https://..), or a
local file. You're going to set it up to:
/tmp/maints.list
This file must contain lines matching:
PACKAGE_NAME\s+MAINTAINER_NAME@
For example:
telnet john@distro.com
kernel smith@distro.com
[gc@bi ~] cat /tmp/maints.list
transfig gc@mandrakesoft.com
hdparm gc@mandrakesoft.com
kernel hacker@mandrakesoft.com
</pre>
<hr />
<p>
This is the perfect moment to introduce the <b>`-q'</b> and
<b>`-Q'</b> options, which allow to query the packages one is
responsible for. The first one is the short version, the second
one prints the version and release as well.
</p>
<pre>
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -q gc
hdparm
transfig
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -Q gc
hdparm-4.1-2
transfig-3.2.3d-2
</pre>
<hr />
<p>
Ok, now that we're set up with the database, let's retry again to
run the check against latest versions published on Freshmeat (I
reverted the list of maintainers to the whole one, not the one
illustrating the <b>`-t'</b> option):
</p>
<pre>
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -c
Maintainer Package Our-version Frsh-version
<gc> SysVinit 2.78 2.79
<gc> python 1.5.2 2.1
<gc> dmalloc 4.8.1 4.8.2
<gc> gkrellm 1.0.8 1.2.0
</pre>
<p>
This presents you all the packages for which Freshmeat got an
announce for newer packages that what you currently have in your
distro.
</p>
<hr />
<p>
The first column, Maintainer, will become particularly useful when
you set up a database for your whole company; this is the
usefulness of the <b>`-a'</b> option, which builds the database
for everyone; of course, this may last one hour or around,
depending on the quickness of Freshmeat and the quality of your
Internet connectivity.
</p>
<pre>
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -a
Contacting host freshmeat.net several times to find entries in their database.
package `Xdialog'
Directly exists as /projects/Xdialog
package `lm_sensors-devel'
-- 0 projects found --
package `lout-doc'
-- 0 projects found --
package `SDL11'
-- 0 projects found --
package `wu-ftpd'
Directly exists as /projects/wu-ftpd
package `gmp-devel'
-- 0 projects found --
package `librep'
Directly exists as /projects/librep
package `mod_dav'
Directly exists as /projects/mod_dav
[...]
</pre>
<hr />
<p>
The <b>`-l'</b> functionality, as described, will run rpmlint on
all the packages one is responsible for. We can expect many errors
since rpmlint is tuned to tightly fit our distrib's policy, and
since I chose to use the packages in Rawhide rather than at
Mandrake's, it will generate many irrelevant errors:
</p>
<pre>
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -l gc
W: hdparm invalid-vendor Red Hat, Inc.
W: hdparm invalid-distribution Red Hat Linux
W: hdparm manpage-not-bzipped /usr/share/man/man8/hdparm.8.gz
W: hdparm invalid-packager Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla>
W: hdparm not-standard-release-extension 2
W: hdparm non-standard-group Applications/System
W: hdparm no-version-in-last-changelog
W: transfig invalid-vendor Red Hat, Inc.
W: transfig invalid-distribution Red Hat Linux
W: transfig manpage-not-bzipped /usr/X11R6/man/man1/fig2dev.1x.gz
W: transfig manpage-not-bzipped /usr/X11R6/man/man1/fig2ps2tex.1x.gz
W: transfig manpage-not-bzipped /usr/X11R6/man/man1/pic2tpic.1x.gz
W: transfig manpage-not-bzipped /usr/X11R6/man/man1/transfig.1x.gz
W: transfig invalid-packager Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla>
W: transfig not-standard-release-extension 2
W: transfig non-standard-group Applications/Multimedia
W: transfig no-version-in-last-changelog
W: transfig invalid-license distributable
</pre>
<hr />
<p>
The <b>`-p'</b> functionality is maybe the most useful mode of
rpmmon. It can print out who's maintainer of this package you
just found a small bug in, or for which you found a interesting
patch or plugin somewhere, etc. All the cases for which you're
willing to drop quickly a mail to the maintainer of the package.
It supports multiple files in a given query (comma-separated,
mandatory), and let's also illustrate the <b>`-V'</b> option that
asks for more verbose output. As we're all fond of shell
completion, this option also understands packages designated with
their filenames, because extensively typing at keyboard something
like "xmms-more-vis-plugins-unsafe" is a pain.
</p>
<pre>
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -p kdebase
daouda
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -p emacs
flepied
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -p icewm,kdelibs,modutils
florin
daouda
chmouel
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -p icewm,kdelibs,modutils -V
Getting information about packages from: https://qa.mandrakesoft.com/cgi-bin/maints.cgi
Found maintainers for 3132 different packages.
icewm: florin
kdelibs: daouda
modutils: chmouel
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -p /RPMS/xmms-more-vis-plugins-unsafe-1.4.0-2mdk.i586.rpm
gc
[gc@bi ~] rpmmon.pl -p /rawhide/RPMS/octave-2.1.34-3.i386.rpm
vince
</pre>
<hr />
<h2>Author</h2>
<p>
<a href="mailto:gc at mandrakenospamsoft dot com">Guillaume
Cottenceau</a> (for <a
href="http://www.mandrakesoft.com/">MandrakeSoft</a>)
</p>
<hr />
<h2>Legal</h2>
<p>
Copyright 2000-2001 MandrakeSoft.
</p>
<p>
Licensed under the Gnu GPL. In other words, that's free software,
of course.
</p>
<hr />
<a href="http://www.estat.com/getstats?serial=285085103803"><img
src="http://perso.estat.com/cgi-bin/perso/285085103803?page=rpmmontut"
border="0" alt="Estat" /></a>
<p></p>
<font size="-1">Last updated: Fri Aug 10 15:37:08 2001</font>
<address>
<a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer">
<img src="../images/v3c_validated.png" height="31" width="88" align="right" border="0" alt="Valid XHTML 1.0!" />
</a>
</address>
</body></html>
distrib
>
Mandriva
>
current
>
i586
>
media
>
contrib-release-src
>
by-pkgid
>
61aebc449072dc9a3cbf1e07a99bb02d
>
files
>
4
