Creating rpm's in Ubuntu

Converting a deb package to an rpm package is simple, just use alien (alien also supports other package types, tgz, pkg, slp and lsb). But what if you need to start from scratch? Here's how to create an rpm package from scratch in Ubuntu:

1. Install rpm ("sudo aptitude install rpm").
2. Create the spec file (e.g. pkg-1.0.spec).
3. Create the tarball for your sources and place it in /usr/src/rpm/SOURCES.
4. Run rpmbuild -ba pkg-1.0.spec.

This will create two packages: /usr/src/rpm/SRPMS/pkg-1.0-1.src.rpm and /usr/src/rpm/RPMS/i386/pkg-1.0-1.i386.rpm (if your target was i386).

The spec file looks like:

Summary: My SW
Name: MySw
Version: 1.0
Release: 1
Source0: %{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
License: GPL
Group: Development/Tools
%description
This is my SW.
%prep
%setup -q
%build
./configure
make
%install
make install
%files
%defattr(-,root,root)
/usr/local/bin/mysw
%doc /usr/local/info/mysw.info
%doc %attr(0444,root,root) /usr/local/man/man1/mysw.1
%doc COPYING AUTHORS README NEWS

This file should be self-explanatory. In this example the file in /usr/src/rpm/SOURCES should be called MySw-1.0.tar.gz. The spec file can be named anything.