Installing gEDA rpm packages on Fedora

gEDA/gaf applications are available in the default Fedora repositories. The Fedora packages are maintained by Chitlesh Goorah.

It is recommended to install gEDA/gaf releases on Fedora using yum or pirut. Pirut (listed in the menu as “Add/Remove Software”) is a graphical interface for yum.

yum install geda\* pcb gerbv

Note: you have to be root (su -) to install packages.

Each gEDA/gaf release takes one to two days to be packaged up and synchronised with the Fedora mirrors. If a release seems to be missing, you could file a bug report (Request for Enhancement, RFE) on Fedora's bugzilla asking them to update gEDA/gaf for you.

You can follow:

• the releases on Chitlesh Goorah's blog, or
• the gEDA/gaf build times on Fedora's build system

If you want to get their hands dirty by building gEDA/gaf on Fedora, you will need to install the dependencies listed in the gEDA/gaf README file. They can be installed with yum:

yum install libstroke-devel groff autoconf gtk2-devel gd-devel gettext-devel guile-devel

The Fedora Project provides simple tools for anyone to rebuild RPMs from SRPMs. An SRPM contains the upstream sources, the spec file and the patches required (if any).

To be able to build RPMs, you will need a build platform, which does NOT require root access. rpmdevtools provides the requires tools to do so.

yum install rpmdevtools

The build platform should be built under a NON-root account.

fedora-buildrpmtree

You will see a rpmbuild folder in your $HOME directory. This directory will be your build platform.

Fedora provides SRPM of every package it has. You can download those SRPMs using the yumdownloader tool from the yum-utils package.

yum install yum-utils

if you don't have yum-utils installed already.

Download the geda-gaf SRPM (under a NON-root account) using:

yumdownloader --source geda-gaf

Once the download is complete the package can be found under the current directory under the filename geda-gaf-%{version}-%{dist}.src.rpm, where %{version} is the current version of gEDA/gaf packaged by Fedora, and %{dist} is the current Fedora version. For example, the gEDA/gaf SRPM for Fedora 14 is called geda-gaf-1.6.1-1.fc14.src.rpm.

The spec file, upstream sources and distribution patches can be extracted from the SRPM using:

rpm -ivh geda-gaf-%{version}-%{dist}.src.rpm

(I remind you that this should never be executed as root!)

You will see

• spec files will be installed in rpmbuild/SPECS
• sources, patches and desktop files will be installed in rpmbuild/SOURCES

First:

1. Download your new sources, as described in the previous section.
2. Edit the rpmbuild/SPECS/%{name}.spec
   1. Edit version tag
   2. Edit release tag
3. Make any other changes you require

Once the previous steps have been completed, you can compile the new RPMs.

cd $HOME/rpmbuild/SPECS/
rpmbuild -ba %{name}.spec

The successfully built RPMS will be found in $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/, and the corresponding SRPM in $HOME/rpmbuild/SRPMS.