Not much here at present, most of my hacks are too frightening to release on an unsuspecting public.

One that is useful is a script to create a custom rpm build environment in a users home directory.
This allows rpms to be built by mortal users.

Mike Harris of Red Hat wrote the original .rpmmacros and .rpmrc files. I simply edited them to suit my needs, and created the rpmsetup.sh script to automate directory creation and installation.

Simply download the rpm_environment.tar.gz file to your home directory:

• Please do the following as a normal user, not as 'root'.
• 'tar -xvzf rpm_environment.tar.gz'
• Change to the newly created directory:
• 'cd rpmenvironment/'
• Look over 'rpmmacros' and 'rpmsetup.sh', making any changes to suit your preferences.
• If you do change the above files, be sure you understand the results of the changes.
• execute ./rpmsetup.sh
• The directories needed by rpm will be added to your home directory.
• The files .rpmmacros and .rpmrc will be installed in your home directory as well.
• You can now install source rpms and work with them as a mortal user.
• By default, the rpm root directory is setup as /home/[user]/rpmbuild/
• Using this setup, src.rpm packages will install to ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/%{name}-%{version}
• Specfiles will be with the source, rather than a ~/rpmbuild/SPECS directory.
• The above defaults can be changed by editing ~/.rpmmacros
• To prevent rpm from creating debug rpms, add the following line to ~/.rpmmacros:

• %debug_package          %{nil}

• To prevent a missing doc file from terminating the build, add:

• %_missing_doc_files_terminate_build    0

• To prevent an unpackaged file from terminating the build, add:

• %_unpackaged_files_terminate_build    0

A set of scripts to create an updated set of rpm files which can be used to create updated installation CDs for Red Hat Linux. These scripts simply update the rpm build tree, regenerate the hard drive lists, and create updated ISO images. Most useful when there are only a few updates, and there is no need to completely rebuild the installation media.

A set of scripts to rebuild the Red Hat install media. May be used to generate completely rebuilt installer images, including updated RPM files. These scripts generate new boot images, run split distro, create new hdlist files, etc. Use these to rebuild the installer from the ground up.

Lost your rpm database? If so, recover_rpm_db.sh might be able to help. Recent versions of rpm install a cron job that runs daily to create a list of installed rpms in /var/log/rpmpkgs. This script uses that file, or any other file containing a list of rpms, to rebuild a new rpm database. Simply run the script with arguments of -f {file_containing_rpm_list} -p {path(s)_containing_packages.rpm} (Multiple paths may be searched by providing a space seperated list of search paths.)

This script is intended for disaster recovery only.

If the existing rpm database is corrupt, or if you intend to rebuild the database completely, you may want to reinitialize the database first by running 'rpm --initdb'