Regarding updates, I regard Fedora as a living on the edge distribution, where experimentations are done and new software is built. The new startup daemon being ported to Fedora 14 is a primary sample of this. And this is the advantage of Fedora over, say, Ubuntu. Ubuntu has the momentum, the buzz, a company beyond – all of this, but has also critical issues in upstream contribution (Gnome comes to mind), innovation, and also patching.

What can be done? Innovation is the holy grail of Fedora, and that should stay. Perhaps, instead of following a 6 months release cycle, we could take a more progressive approach – an 8 month release cycle? Some LTS releases? Open to suggestions.

Hope Firefox catch back the performance crown, or anyway improve it to be good enough. In the meantime, Chromium is my platform.

Looking carefully, the first one is named django_extensions, but really the name should be “django-extensions”, and you can find the project with the not intuitive name of “django-commandline-extensions” here at googlecode.

Ok, let’s see the spec file:

%{!?python_sitelib: %define python_sitelib %(%{__python} -c “from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()”)}

Name:           django-extensions
Version:        0.4.1
Release:        1%{?dist}
Summary:        Django command line extensions

Up to this point, standard stuff. The {?dist} should stand for “current distribution”, so it will end in a “fc11″ package.

Group:          Development/Languages
License:        BSD
URL:            http://code.google.com/p/django-command-extensions/
Source0:        %{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
Source1:        %{name}-docs-%{version}.tar.gz

The Group is standard for Python / Django libraries. License is taken from the project’s homepage, source is the standard .tar.gz file which is downloaded from the front page of the project. Source1 is extracted from the github 0.4.1 tag of the project and contains just the documentation to be built.

BuildRoot:      %{_tmppath}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}-root-%(%{__id_u} -n)

BuildArch:      noarch
BuildRequires:  python-devel python-sphinx
Requires:       Django

%description
This is a repository for collecting global custom management extensions
for the Django Framework

The buildroot path is standard, arch is noarch (just python code…), the build requires gets the addition of python-sphinx (python documentation generator) which, at buildtime, generates html documentation from .rst files. Obviously runtime requirements are Django, while the description is a copy and paste from the project home page.

%package doc
Summary:        Documentation for django-extensions
Group:          Documentation
Requires:       %{name} = %{version}-%{release}
Provides:       %{name}-docs = %{version}-%{release}
Obsoletes:      %{name}-docs < %{version}-%{release}

%description doc
This package contains the documentation for the django-extension library

Wait a minute, what is this? Exactly, we are building not one but two packages. One for code, one for doc.

%prep
%setup -q -n %{name}-%{version}
%setup -a 1

Ok, now things become interesting. According to both the Fedora Project RPM Guide and the Maximum RPM book on rpm.org, the above section reads as: prepare environment; extract first source file silently in a directory named $name-$version (e.g. django-extension-0.4.1), then extract the second source file after changing directory to the newly created directory. This is necessary because I compressed just the docs directory level in the git-donwloaded file.

%build
%{__python} setup.py build

%install
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
%{__python} setup.py install -O1 –skip-build –root $RPM_BUILD_ROOT

(cd docs && make html)

All this stuff comes standard creating an empty python spec file, apart from the last line, which builds the html documentation. This is suggested also by Django spec file (go get it with a yumdownloader –source Django and rpm -ivh the src.rpm).

%clean
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT

%files
%defattr(-,root,root,-)
%{python_sitelib}/*

Standard stuff again.

%files doc
%doc docs

doc packages files

%changelog
* Sun Aug 23 2009 Luca Botti <lucabotti…fedoraproject.org>
- Initial RPM Release

changelog description.

This file is uploaded at my fedorapeople.org‘s address and is submitted in bugzilla for review here. I am waiting for sponsorship. Thanks.

More packages will follow. Stay tuned.

On the link above you will find all the info for the project, so let’s start. We will build the release version of Pinax (for development versions I have a side project, which I will show you at right time). Please note – all the release used are current for the day this entry has been written.

Download pinax version 0.5.1 from here and put it in rpmbuild/SOURCES. After that:

cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS

rpmdev-newspec -t python pinax

Rpmdev-newspec creates the skeleton for a new spec file named pinax. The -t python option tells to create a skeleton with some python definitions in it (python definitions are laid out according to this wiki entry on the Fedora Project Wiki); you can see which skeletons are available looking in ‘\etc\rpmdevtools’.

Why Python? Well, my guess is that being DJango a Python framework, you know….

Let’s look at the spec file and put some info into that. You can use any editor for the file (I use geany, fast and lightweight).

# sitelib for noarch packages, sitearch for others (remove the unneeded one)
%{!?python_sitelib: %global python_sitelib %(%{__python} -c “from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()”)}
%{!?python_sitearch: %global python_sitearch %(%{__python} -c “from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib(1)”)}

Name: pinax
Version:
Release: 1%{?dist}
Summary:

Group: Development/Languages
License:
URL:
Source0:
BuildRoot: %{_tmppath}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}-root-%(%{__id_u} -n)

BuildArch:
BuildRequires: python-devel

I am assuming that Pinax is a pure python package, so we use the sitelib for noarch packages (first line of the two provided). After that we have to insert some descriptive info of the Pinax project.

But, of course, before going ahead we must check some of the Pinax dependencies.

Continuing tomorrow…

I need sponsorship, so if somebody reading this blog entry is willing to step up, bugzilla’s bug 518647 and bug 518636 are asking for support.

A question to fedora guys: why the fedorapeople.org email alias is not working with my mail address?

Ok, then. Let’s try to keep up the pace. Just download this file and be happy again. Just, before doing the install, remove previous packages.

A note to contributors: I did not merge your suggestions, yet, because right now I am on vacation. In the next weeks I will check them.