pkgbox

Welcome to the pkgbox RPM repository for RHEL 6/CentOS 6

Everyone needs some additional software sometimes. So do I. Either it is the wonderful webframework Mojolicious or it is the nice collectd statistics daemon. Or it could be a simple hello world script which needs to be installed on my server. Did I mention the squirrelmail plugins for sieve – such as avelsieve? Everything of this software can be downloaded from the internet. The installation steps are always the same:

# DON'T DO THIS!
./configure && make && sudo make install

and there you go.

Congratulations – you’ve just moved your environment one step forward to its death. After you did this several times, you’ve filled your environment with junk. You won’t be able to update your system anymore – at least not without breaking stuff.

What is the goal here?

I want to install software on my servers in a clean way which allows me to update stuff, to remove it and to reinstall it. That’s why the RPM system was born. Once you got used to its toolchain its just wonderful and it won’t take too much time to build a RPM package. I’ve done this several times and I decided to provide a repository which you can set up in your /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory. You can use your favorite YUM management tool to install the software I’ve built – plus you will get the updates, too. Please note – as I only use some architectures I’ll provide mainly the packages for x86_64 and the SRPMs (of course). As I am using mock I’ll build the packages for i386 usually, too. Please ask if you are looking for something. Cool, eh?

(Browse the packages – click me)

Quick start – ok, let’s go.

It’s very easy to get started. I provide a single RPM package which can be installed and will this will setup everything you need. Easy, eh? By the way – it’s the same package I use for all my servers.

$ sudo yum install http://rpm.pkgbox.org/pkgbox-repo-6.noarch.rpm
$ sudo yum update

That’s all. Your yum package manager is now informed about the new package repository and if you are looking for software, you’ll search my repo, too.

(Shesssht, something not working? You need to enable the EPEL repo, too) 

Now the detailed stuff…

I am building all my packages with mock as stated earlier. Mock provides a chroot based build system which makes sure that only the things specified in the spec file of the RPM are installed. That’s a nice way to build packages with correct dependencies and file lists. I’ll try to build my packages along the Fedora project guidelines. All my packages are signed with my GPG key which is available here.

By the way – my packages depend on the core repositories of CentOS and the EPEL repository. Please make sure to enable the EPEL repository before you start using the pkgbox repository. I like the DAG/rpmforge repository, no offense, however – I don’t want to enable every repository when it’s not needed. When I need something from the DAG repo, I’ll check if I can build it on my own or try to find a different way. If there is no way around – I’ll choose the DAG repo. The pkgbox repository won’t include any packages which have dependencies to other repositories except the CentOS base/update repos or EPEL.

Feedback and Responsibilties

I am not responsible if something is not working for you. I am not responsible for your stuff in any way, even when you loose data. However, I am using these packages inside the repository for myself and for the servers I am responsible for.

Building the packages and providing this webspace cost time and money. Saying thanks in a comment doesn’t hurt anyone and will keep up my motivation :)

Thanks – enjoy the packages

–rhaen

- small printed stuff-
The icons on this webpage and on the index pages of the webserver are part of the nuoveXT iconset which has been published under GPL.