Is it possible to repackage tarballs as rpm's?

hi all
i have just installed qt 4 tarball with a view to installing kde 3.4 and its dependencies as rpm packages. the qt4 installation went fine (took ages, though), but when i clicked on arts to install it, the installer(i'm using rpmdrake) said that i needed to install qt :(.
i changed the PATH and PKG_CONFIG variables in .bashrc to that of the qt bin and lib directories, but arts doesn't seem to be able to 'realise' that qt even exists on my system.
is there any way that i can get an rpm package to be aware of where tarballs are installed because? alternatively, is there a way of somehow repackaging a tarball as a rpm? i'm sure there's a program which can achieve this, but i can't remember the name.
help is very much appreciated

search for a program called alien, you should be able to get it through most package managers. It converts between rpm, tarball, deb, etc...

There is another small utility that can do this: checkinstall

The way it works is quite simple, instead of running "make install" in your compilation process, you run "checkinstall". You'll be asked to choose between deb, rpm and slackware package and it'll automatically create and install the package of your choice.

It also asks some other questions (such as to provide a package description), but it's not too important and you can skip all questions except the one where you answer with "RPM" by passing a -y option. So it is like this when you install a normal source package:

./configure
make
(su as root)
checkinstall -y
(choose RPM)

and voila, you get a RPM package created at the same directory and installed to the system. :)

I've never used it to convert to RPM though, but it works like a charm for slackware's tgz packs and should work for RPM and deb as well.

Daniel

thanks guys

the alien packages rings a bell, and i think i've heard of it before. the checkinstall packageis one that i'm using right now. i used to have that package on my system but i never used it. for installing tarballs i've always used gpaco to keep track of where each file was installed. i found that it works quite well. i never knew that checkinstall could create rpm packages, though. i do now :). checkinstall seems to be what i'm looking for.
i've configured and done "make" for qt4. it is just in the process of installing it now. i put the sources on my desktop, but it appears that i may have to put the sources in /usr/src/RPM/SOURCES and then "./configure" and "make" all over again. it complains that it "cannot stat /usr/src/RPM/SOURCES/qt4-X11-opensource". i guess i'll just have to see how things go. if i have no joy, i'll give alien a go. although the writers of alien say that it will probably always be beta software.

whether it creates a rpm package at the end of the process, i'll have to wait and see.


EDIT: checkinstall worked like a charm (eventually). thank you, both of you :).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Libervisco

There is another small utility that can do this: checkinstall

The way it works is quite simple, instead of running "make install" in your compilation process, you run "checkinstall". You'll be asked to choose between deb, rpm and slackware package and it'll automatically create and install the package of your choice.

It also asks some other questions (such as to provide a package description), but it's not too important and you can skip all questions except the one where you answer with "RPM" by passing a -y option. So it is like this when you install a normal source package:

./configure
make
(su as root)
checkinstall -y
(choose RPM)

and voila, you get a RPM package created at the same directory and installed to the system. :)

---

I use checkinstall a lot. It doesn't always work, but it works reasonably often.

On occasions checkinstall will fail to work. In such cases one "work around" I found, is sometimes after ./configure and make, and as su/root checkinstall (where checkinstall then fails), I do the following:

Still logged in the bash shell as "su/root" I then immediately run the traditional make install, and then run checkinstall a second time, immediately after a successful "make install". Checkinstall will often still have my "settings" from my initial failed checkinstall already entered. And checkinstall will often work this second time (after make install), while it failed the first time.

I've also found I can take this rpm from checkinstall, and copy it to another linux pc on my network (where I maintain identical linux packages), and the rpm will install the packaged program on the second pc.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by oldcpu

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Libervisco

There is another small utility that can do this: checkinstall

The way it works is quite simple, instead of running "make install" in your compilation process, you run "checkinstall". You'll be asked to choose between deb, rpm and slackware package and it'll automatically create and install the package of your choice.

It also asks some other questions (such as to provide a package description), but it's not too important and you can skip all questions except the one where you answer with "RPM" by passing a -y option. So it is like this when you install a normal source package:

./configure
make
(su as root)
checkinstall -y
(choose RPM)

and voila, you get a RPM package created at the same directory and installed to the system. :)

---

I use checkinstall a lot. It doesn't always work, but it works reasonably often.

On occasions checkinstall will fail to work. In such cases one "work around" I found, is sometimes after ./configure and make, and as su/root checkinstall (where checkinstall then fails), I do the following:

Still logged in the bash shell as "su/root" I then immediately run the traditional make install, and then run checkinstall a second time, immediately after a successful "make install". Checkinstall will often still have my "settings" from my initial failed checkinstall already entered. And checkinstall will often work this second time (after make install), while it failed the first time.

I've also found I can take this rpm from checkinstall, and copy it to another linux pc on my network (where I maintain identical linux packages), and the rpm will install the packaged program on the second pc.

---

i also noticed that it failed to work on occassion. the same as you, i noticed that if i ran "checkinstall -R", it would fail at the beginning. if i ran "make install", then ran "checkinstall -R", it would would work fine. i don't know why.