Cracking Open an RPM

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Mar 01, 2004, Leon Goldstein wrote:
>How does one disassemble an RPM?  I want to extract some files from a 
>SuSE RPM without installing them.
>My project is trying to resurrect WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, 
>which dies when glibc 2.3.2 is installed.
>I want to put the older compatible glibc in a system with glibc 2.3.2 
>and set the environment variable for the WPO2KL
>start up script to load the older lib.

The command ``rpm -i $package.src.rpm'' will install the RPM
components under the /usr/src/packages directory.  The sources
will be under SOURCES, the spec file under SPECS.  Then the
command ``rpm -bp /usr/src/packages/SPECS/$package.spec'' will
extract the pristine sources, apply any patches, and leave the
results under the /usr/src/packages/BUILD directory.

The top directory for RPM varies amongst distributions, but can
always be found with the command:

	rpm --eval '%{_topdir}'

Bill
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