openSUSE Factory / Compiz 0.8.4

Doubtless you’re all aware that openSUSE 11.2, as great and up to date it is with many packages, was shipped with an outdated version of compiz version 0.7.8. The reasoning behind this was that some patches for NOMAD just were not able to be forward ported in reasonable time. At one point I started fixing / backporting some fixes from 0.8.4 to 0.7.8 and was granted maintainer status for the compiz packages, which is a great honor to me. Nevertheless, this happened too late in the 11.2 release cycle to include more recent packages. We were already in version freeze and I could never get this through.

But the good news: development of openSUSE 11.3 started and not much longer, all compiz related packages have been updated to their latest and greatest (hopefully) version. The development project X11:Compiz in the openSUSE BuildService already has fully built packages, which I tested on my Factory installation. In order to target a larger audience for testing, those packages have also been forwarded to openSUSE Factory. So if you’re running Factory and Compiz on it: be prepared for this update.

Should you happen to see any bugs, feel free to report all of them in Bugzilla (component and product are pre-selected with this link).

RPM packaging for beginners

So, my first post on my blog. The most difficult part: what to write about? As openSUSE just had it’s first community week with plenty of people participating, I decide to go with the flow.

I for myself am mostly active in the community with packaging all kinds of thins, and of couse mailinglists, testing openSUSE Factory and IRC channels.

Packaging is an important part for the community and for a distribution’s users. Not everybody has the knowledge or will to install something from source. Some packages are highly complex, others are very simple.

Let’s start with something simple, which does not end up in a complex spec file (the spec is the package build instructions). During the Community week, I was asked to package up cairo-clock, which ended up being fairly easy and suits perfect for this example.

Pre-required knowledge: how to install a program from a source tarball.
Typically this is handled with

./configure
make
sudo make install

And this is exactly true for cairo-clock (once all the build dependencies are satisfied).

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