building an rpm from oddnamed tarball contents

If you are trying to build an rpm from a packed source, where the unpacked source expandes into a non %{name}-%{version} format, you can use the -n option in the %prep section of the .spec to tell rpmbuild to look in the right place ( eg. %prep -n %{name}%{version} )

if name.12.6.tar.gz expands into name-linux you would use something like this in the %prep

%prep -n %{name}-linux

However, if the tarball expands without a path, you then need to use the -c option to create a path, cd into the path and then untar the contents.

I am blogging this here mainly since there seems to be little info on this online, and it might come in handy for people!

Lets also not forget, that you should still try and push upstream to fix their taring process, so these sort of situations dont arise in the first place.

--
Karanbir Singh { http://www.karan.org/ }