About half a year back, Cédric and I did start a test to see if Mattermost is a valuable tool for the Eclipse community. Failure was an option, since a new tool should bring some benefit to the community.

A few weeks back I wrote a blog post about writing RPM files in plain Java.

What was left over was the fact that the library was not available outside of Package Drone itself. Although it was created as a stand alone functionality you would need to fetch the JAR and somehow integrate it into your build.

The Maven RPM Builder got a few new features. Version 0.3.0 can now:

• Create symbolic links
• Specify pre/post install/remove scripts
• Declare all kinds of dependencies (requires, provides, conflicts, obsoletes)
• And has a much better documentation

In several occasions I had to build RPM packages for installing software. In the past I mostly did it with a Maven build using the RPM Maven Plugin.

The process is simple: At the end of your build you gather up all resources, try to understand the mapping configuration, bang your head a few times in order to figure out way to work with -SNAPSHOT versions and that’s it. In the end you have a few RPM files.

Now creating an RPM file is easy. There are a lot of tutorials out there on how write a SPEC file and build your RPM. Even when you are using Maven … with the exception that when you are on Windows or Mac OS X, the Maven RPM plugin will still try to invoke rpmbuild in order to actually build the RPM file. The maven bundle simply creates a SPEC file, layout out the payload data and lets rpmbuild do the processing.