Footnotes

... package: See Appendix on page for complete details on the contents of a .rpm file.
... package.: For more information on RPM's signature checking capability, refer to section on page .
... file.: We'll discuss MD5 checksums in greater detail in section on page .
... RPM!: Are you interested in what exactly ``the right thing'' means? Turn to page and read section for more details.
... contents.: We'll get more into this aspect of RPM in chapter when we discuss rpm -V, specifically section on page
... goose.: You'll have to do that yourself!
... installed.: For more information on erasing packages with rpm -e, see chapter on page .
... force: No pun intended.
... files.: For more information on rpmrc files, refer to Appendix on page .
... out:: We discuss RPM's query commands in chapter .
... disk.: It's possible to use RPM's query command to see if a package has pre- or post-install scripts. See section on page for more information.
...<path>.: For more information on rpmrc file entries, see Appendix .
... entry.: The use of rpmrc files is described in Appendix
... entry.: The use of rpmrc files is described in Appendix
... entries.: If you are porting RPM, you'll find more on arch_compat in section on page .
... entries.: If you are porting RPM, you'll find more on os_compat in section on page .
...<path>.: For more information on rpmrc file entries, see Appendix .
... erase.: See chapter on page for more information on rpm -q.
... file.¹: Actually, there's a one in $2^{128}$ chance a change will go undetected, but for all practical purposes, it's as close to perfect as we can get.
... modified.²: Or, as some sticklers for detail may note, it may have been modified, and subsequently those modifications were undone.
... file.³: For more information on RPM's use of URLs, please see section on page .
... force ⁴: Pun intended.
... answer.¹: On most Linux systems, the file command can be used to obtain similar information. See Appendix for details on how to add this capability to your system's file command.
... package.²: Note to software packagers: Choose your build machine names wisely! A silly or offensive name might be embarrassing...
... value.³: For more information on rpmrc file entries, please refer to Appendix on page .
... verification.⁴: For more information on package verification, please see section on page .
... instructions.⁵: RPM uses printf to do --queryformat formatting. Therefore, you can use any of the printf format modifiers discussed in the printf(3) man page.
...<path>.⁶: For more information on rpmrc file entries, see Appendix .
... too.⁷: Did you see this example and say to yourself, ``Hey, they could've used the -g option to query for that group directly''? If you did, you've been paying attention. This is a more general way of searching the RPM database for information: we just happened to search by group in this example.
... provides.¹: Actually, the price is fairly low. For a completely RPM-based Linux distribution, it would be unusual to have a database over 5MB in size.
... checksum.²: From a strictly theoretical standpoint, this is not entirely true. Using the lingo of cryptologists, it is believed to be ``computationally infeasible'' to find two messages that produce the same MD5 checksum.
...-v:³: Failure messages will always be displayed.
...<path>.⁴: For more information on rpmrc file entries, see Appendix .
...%verify ⁵: See page for details on %verify
... file.¹: For more information on rpmrc files, rpmrc file entries, and how to use them, please see Appendix on page .
... offices.²: Red Hat Software's public key is also available from their website, at http://www.redhat.com/redhat/contact.html. The RPM sources also contain the key, and are available from their FTP site at ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/code/rpm.
... blocks.¹: Note that the size displayed by cpio is the size of the cpio archive and not the package file.
...cdplayer.¹: In reality, this software is a mercilessly hacked version of cdp, which was written by Sariel Har-Peled. The software was hacked to provide a simple example package, and in no way represents the fine work done by Sariel on cdp.
...tar.²: For more information on the environment variables used in the build-time scripts, please refer to section on page .
... testing.³: Like we said, it's a fairy tale!
... build.¹: As we mentioned in chapter , if the original sources need to be modified, the modifications should be kept as a separate set of patches. However, during development, it makes more sense to not generate patches every time a change to the original source is made.
... section ²: Or the %clean section, it doesn't matter -- the end result is the same.
... is:³: It should be noted that the package was built substantially later than November of 1995!
... export.¹: There is also an ``international'' version that may be used in non-US countries. See Appendix on page .
... option ²: Described in section on page .
... suffice.³: Keep in mind that this command in a %clean script can wreak havoc if used with a build root of, say, /. Section on page discusses this in more detail.
... 1.⁴: Or it will be 1, once the package is completely installed. Remember, the number is based on the number of packages installed after the current package's install or erase has completed.
... tags:⁵: Yes, the source tags should include a URL pointing to the sources.
... installed.⁶: This is not entirely the case when a relocatable package is being built. For more information on relocatable packages, see chapter on page .
... those.⁷: RPM will automatically exclude file attributes from verification if it doesn't make sense for the type of file. In our example, getting the MD5 checksum of a device file is an example of such a situation.
... installed.¹: As long as the requiring and the providing packages are installed using the same invocation of RPM, the dependency checking will succeed. For example, the command rpm -ivh *.rpm will properly check for dependencies, even if the requiring package ends up being installed before the providing package.
... installation.¹: Hey, we said it was hypothetical!
... path.²: For more information on the %docdir directive, please see section on page .
... does.³: Install and erase-time scripts have an environment variable, RPM_INSTALL_PREFIX, that can be used to write scripts that are able to act appropriately if the package is relocated. See section on page for more information.
... install.¹: Keep in mind that the build root can be overridden at build-time using the --buildroot option or the buildroot rpmrc file entry. See chapter on page for more details.
... PGP.¹: The list of possible signature types can be found in the RPM sources, specifically signature.h in RPM's lib subdirectory.
... file.¹: Hey, we said it was a simple example!
... be.²: This is the advantage to making up an example. A more real-world spec file would undoubtedly have more interesting scripts.
... packages.³: Five, if you count the source package.
... distribute.⁴: Yes, the author found out about this hard way!
... hardware.¹: This is a somewhat simplistic view of the matter, as it's common for incompatibilities to crop up between two different implementations of the same operating system on different architectures.
... flawlessly.¹: Well, eventually it did!
... build.²: Of course, if the process of installing the software changed some necessary config files, they would have to be redone, but in this case it didn't happen.
... lead.¹: Please refer to section on page for a discussion on identifying RPM package files with the file command.
... header.²: The header is discussed in section on page .
... architecture.³: It should be noted that the architecture used internally by RPM is actually stored in the header. This value is strictly for file(1)'s use.
... entry.¹: The buildostranslate rpmrc file entry is discussed on page .
... N/A ¹: Since there is no modifier to display the file states in human-readable form, it will be necessary to manually interpret the flag values, based on the RPMFILE_STATE_xxx #defines contained in rpmlib.h. This file is part of the rpm-devel package and is also present in the RPM source package.
... N/A ²: Since there is no modifier to display the verification flags in human-readable form, it will be necessary to manually interpret the flag values, based on the RPMVERIFY_xxx #defines contained in rpmlib.h. This file is part of the rpm-devel package and is also present in the RPM source package.
... below:¹: An up-to-date copy of the list of mirror sites is always available on ftp.redhat.com, in the file MIRRORS.
... good.²: If your goal is to install RPM on one of these systems, it might be a good idea to copy the appropriate binary package. That way, once you have RPM running, you can reinstall it with the --force option to ensure that RPM is properly installed and configured.
... like ¹: When we say that keys are numbers, we aren't lying even though the example key doesn't look like a number. It has been processed so that it can be concisely displayed using only printable characters.
... them ²: Or at least that it didn't make it to you unchanged.
... version ³: Note that there are no commercial restrictions regarding PGP in countries other than the U.S. and Canada.