BlueBubble: What I learned

I had a lot of fun recompiling Gnome 2.32 for Fedora 15, and a lot of help too. Here’s a list of things I learned, in no particular order:

• fedpkg is the best thing ever. It grabs the specs, it builds the rpms, it cooks bacon. (More on that later)
• The Fedora Project Weightless Packager Cube is better than I thought. (It’s the one on the right, with no preview image)
• You can’t install 32 bit and 64bit -devel packages of every library, therefore needing a Virtual Machine or a secondary computer
• If you’re on 64bit Fedora, installing 32bit -devel packages will let you bypass the BuildRequires, but will fail because the 64bit package isn’t actually installed.
• If you’re on 32bit Fedora, installing the 64bit -devel packages will let you bypass the BuildRequires but will fail because the 32bit package isn’t actually installed… (See what I did there? Yeah, took me a while to catch on too)
• Building on a Virtual Machine is slooooooooooooooooooow.
• I spent a couple of hours chowning and chmodding an RPM trying to get rpm –resign to work. (See below)
• This bug needs love.This bug needs love.This bug needs love. (It’s worth saying three times just to get you to click it)
• Building as root is a terrible, terrible idea.
• There’s a huge difference between rm -rf %{_libdir}/* and rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/* (See above)
• There are build orders for a reason. (And I wrote a song about that)
• createrepo makes creating a repository an extremely easy task.
• The comps.xml file isn’t built by fairies, but is powered by Dark Elf magic.
• Fighting against artificial obsolescence is kinda hard.
• If you Provide: %{title}, and you Conflicts: %{title}, yum will throw a warning. Use Conflicts: %{title} >= {your-version} instead.
• The best way to avoid artificial obsolescence is to rename your package and skip the Provides clause.
• Google returns about 2,190 results for “artificial obsolescence”.
• If you listen to your heart, it goes “lub-dub” “lub-dub” “lub-dub”
• rsync is like my bff now.
• Adding alias ding=”play /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/complete.oga” to your .bashrc is an absolute must.
• Adding alias bake-on=”fedpkg local && ding” to your .bashrc makes building tastier.

As a closing note, I’ve got both 32bit and 64bit packages uploaded to the BlueBubble repository. If you’re having issues, clean your cache.