Ever used an RPM package? sure you have – it’s that little thing that makes life all so easy when installing anything on a RedHat/Suse based system. RPM packages can make your life really simple and fast, as long as you stick to the main track of using the stock RPM packages – however, what happens when you need to stir away?

Over the course of the past few months, I’ve been doing some extensive usage of the OpenSER SIP proxy package. Now, if you go to the OpenSER website, you will find that they supply a multitude of distribution options, ranging from simple tar.gz source files, up to fully compiled binaries for SUSE.

Now, unfortunately for me, while I would really like to use a ready made RPM package, I can’t as my platform is not an i386 system – it’s an x86_64 XEON system. So, I have two options: compile from scratch or use a source RPM. A source RPM is a package that contains all the code and compilation instructions and scripts to create a fully working RPM packages, exactly tailored for your system. Sounds great, download the SRPM package, rebuild it and you should be done – that’s exactly it: IT’S A BIG FAT NO!

Apparently, the available SRPM packages are not truley cross platform, thus, rebuilding on an x86_64 machine is virtually impossible – unless you start playing around with the package SPEC file – which in other words – A SHIT!

It is one thing debugging your own SPEC file, it is completely another to try and modify a SPEC file meant for a 32bit platform to work on multiple platforms -YUCK!