Fedora Package Contributor for Allegro

It's been a long time since I've posted anything on here and I guess it's long overdue. I've either lacked a good topic to type about or was just too drained to do so. Well no longer!

I figured I would take a moment to announce that I've become a package contributor for the Fedora project. What does that mean? It just means that I'm currently contributing to the development or maintenance of one or more of the RPM packages for the project. In particular, I'm maintaining the Allegro 5 packages. What this means is that I took the Allegro 5 source code and turned it into RPM packages. The main repository that I'm using to track Allegro 5 package development is available on GitHub: http://github.com/bamccaig/allegro5-rpm. Don't confuse me though with the actual Allegro developers who deserve the real praise for the Allegro library!

There are plans for me to help out with or take over the Allegro 4 packages as well (which I think will include games and other related projects). I've just recently gotten Allegro 5 adopted into Fedora 13 and 14 (15 AKA Alpha is pending) and 15. AFAIK, Fedora is the first distribution to get Allegro 5 packages! So yay for that! I'll now be working on updating the Allegro 4 packages (allegro) to the latest stable version, 4.4.x.y.

I guess that makes me an "official" contributor to Fedora. So that's pretty exciting. I think so, at least. What are you waiting for? Go put my packages in action! You can learn how to here if you don't already know.

Since there isn't much else to say about that, I'll take a few moments to discuss a few of the things I learned about working with RPMs. RPMs are based on a .spec file that basically just describes the package in a text file: name, description, version, release, where to get the source code, the software license, build instructions, which files to install, what their permissions should be, etc. To turn a .spec file into an SRPM[1] or RPM you use the rpmbuild tool. Once installed you can easily query the package system for information about a package using rpm or yum. For example:

$ # Lets query the basic information about the core allegro5 package.
$ yum info allegro5
*snip*
Name        : allegro5
Arch        : i686
Version     : 5.0.0
Release     : 3.fc13
Size        : 994 k
Repo        : installed
From repo   : updates
Summary     : A game programming library
URL         : http://liballeg.org/
License     : zlib
Description : Allegro is a cross-platform library intended for use in computer games
            : and other types of multimedia programming. Allegro 5 is the latest major
            : revision of the library, designed to take advantage of modern hardware
            : (e.g. hardware acceleration using 3D cards) and operating systems.
            : Although it is not backwards compatible with earlier versions, it still
            : occupies the same niche and retains a familiar style.

$ # Lets query the changelog of the core allegro5 package.
$ rpm -q --changelog allegro5
* Wed Mar 09 2011 Brandon McCaig  5.0.0-3
- Adding file permissions to subpackages.
- Moving devel files (namely .so symlinks) to devel packages.
- Added %doc section proper; readmes, changes, license, etc.
- Fixed SF.net URI.
- Modified BuildRequires.
- Added main devel dependency to subpackage devels.
- Replaced many al_*.3* manpage files with a glob.
- Replaced many header files with directory and %exclude macros.
- Added allegro5.cfg file under /etc/allegro5rc.

* Fri Mar 04 2011 Brandon McCaig  5.0.0-2
- Merged primitives addon packages into core packages.
- Merged memfile addon packages into core packages.
- Merged "main" addon packages into core packages.
- Merged font packages into core packages.
- Merged color packages into core packages.
- Merged doc package into the devel package.
- Fixed spelling mistakes.
- Removed explicit library dependencies.

* Fri Feb 25 2011 Brandon McCaig  5.0.0-1
- Initial version.

$ 

I was actually quite happy to learn just how easy it is to create RPMs that work. RPM seems to be very smart and figures out a lot of the dependencies itself. Contributing simple packages really isn't very difficult if you already know a thing or two about how to build them from source (programming experience helps too). So if you're a programmer that uses Fedora (or any other Linux distribution) and wants to help out by becoming a packager then I suggest you look into it. It's not as difficult as you might think.

Thanks to my sponsor[2] for guiding me through the process and helping me out when I got stuck.

References

[1] An SRPM is a source RPM. It basically is just an RPM that contains the .spec file, source tarball, and any patches that might be bundled. The SRPM is an intermediary stage between the source code and .spec and the fully-fledged RPM.
[2] I'll refrain from naming him without his permission to do so, just in case, but you can probably find out who it is easily enough by checking out the fedora bugzilla system if you care. :) He knows who he is. :)