Does anyone here know of a good graphical tool for building RPM's?

[Sunner]

I've been looking around a bit, and I found one called "rust", however it seems like it's quite old, and there's no documentation or anything, seems like an abandoned project.

The reason Im asking is cause we're likely gonna start packaging some inhouse developed software in RPM format, and there are quite a few components included, and new versions are released almost weekly, so both the work, and the risk of human error would make writing and updating SPEC files quite the hassle.

 

[Armitage]

Did you check freshmeat?
I thought I saw something like that once, but lost all my links recently 🙁

 

[Sunner]

I've found a couple of such projects, unfortunately it seems like they've all been abandoned long ago. 🙁

 

[Armitage]

Sometimes, they aren't really abandoned... they just look that way becayse they do everything the author intended. Might still be worth a try.

 

[cleverhandle]

What exactly are the features you're looking for that can't be handled by text tools? Besides the changelog, a well-written spec file should only require changing the version and/or release at the top, and use %{version} and similar macros to use that value consistently. And if you really wanted efficiency, I would think you could put together an awk script that would retrieve the version number, suggest an intelligent default for the next one, accept changelog entries, and make the changes. Apart from the spec itself, the only updating should be the source file, which could be handled with a shell script that could build the RPM's, archive old versions, and monitor for errors.

Just seems that using standard tools is as easy as bringing in extra programs here. Particularly if you really are building a large number of RPM's, where using the command line over the GUI will save time.