HOWTO: Building Gnome BitTorrent Downloader RPM package for Fedora

by Thomas Chung on Oct 23, 2004 (UPDATED 2004-11-07)

UPDATE 2004-11-07
Thanks to John Thacker for following information:
"Basically, the latest version 0.0.16 (and probably some earlier) of gnome-btdownload requires newer versions of the pygtk2-* and gnome-python2-* packages. Installing the ones from RawHide or the forthcoming FC3 (and probably some of the FC3test releases) will make it work fine."

UPDATE 2004-10-23
Thanks to Paul Varga for following information:
"Basically, that error is caused by my autoconf script not checking for the correct version of PyGTK when gnome-btdownload does require somewhat newer features.

More details can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=939232&group_id=93129&atid=603214

Version 0.0.17 has been (likely indefinately) delayed because I'd been trying to sort out some threading-deadlock issues that became very obvious due to some change that I apparently made (that I can't remember what is anymore)."

Gnome BitTorrent Downloader is a work-in-progress Gnome "mime-sink" for BitTorrent files. It's not meant to be an entire front-end, just a program that pops up when you "execute" the torrent files. It was written by Paul Varga who felt to write this program in Python since BitTorrent is written in Python.

In this article, I'll be using gnome-btdownload version 0.0.6 to build RPM package for Fedora. Please note the latest version 0.0.16 seems to have a problem with Fedora and I would like to encourage any Python Developers out there to debug the source code and let us know so we can share this wonderful program.

BTW, you need to install bittorrent first. I would suggest to install it from Fedora Extra repository.

[tchung@localhost download]$ ls
bittorrent-3.4.1-0.fdr.2.a.1.noarch.rpm
[tchung@localhost download]$ sudo rpm -Uvh bittorrent-3.4.1-0.fdr.2.a.1.noarch.rpm
warning: bittorrent-3.4.1-0.fdr.2.a.1.noarch.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 8df56d05
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:bittorrent             ########################################### [100%]
[tchung@localhost download]$

Let's begin:
(Make sure you have created rpmbuild directory in your own home.)

First download following files:

- TAR ball: gnome-btdownload-0.0.6.tar.bz2
- Spec File: gnome-btdownload.spec
- Desktop File: gnome-btdownload.desktop

[tchung@localhost download]$ ls
gnome-btdownload-0.0.6.tar.bz2  gnome-btdownload.desktop  gnome-btdownload.spec
[tchung@localhost download]$ cp *.bz2 *.desktop ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/
[tchung@localhost download]$ cp *.spec ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/
[tchung@localhost download]$ rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/gnome-btdownload.spec
Executing(%prep): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.94323
+ umask 022
+ cd /home/tchung/rpmbuild/BUILD
+ LANG=C
+ export LANG
+ unset DISPLAY
+ rm -rf /var/tmp/gnome-btdownload-0.0.6-buildroot
+ cd /home/tchung/rpmbuild/BUILD
+ rm -rf gnome-btdownload-0.0.6
+ /usr/bin/bzip2 -dc /home/tchung/rpmbuild/SOURCES/gnome-btdownload-0.0.6.tar.bz2

... omitted ...

Wrote: /home/tchung/rpmbuild/SRPMS/gnome-btdownload-0.0.6-0.FC1.src.rpm
Wrote: /home/tchung/rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/gnome-btdownload-0.0.6-0.FC1.i386.rpm
Executing(%clean): /bin/sh -e /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.94323
+ umask 022
+ cd /home/tchung/rpmbuild/BUILD
+ cd gnome-btdownload-0.0.6
+ rm -rf /var/tmp/gnome-btdownload-0.0.6-buildroot
+ exit 0
[tchung@localhost download]$

To install the RPM package,

[tchung@localhost download]$ sudo rpm -Uvh /home/tchung/rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/gnome-btdownload-0.0.6-0.FC1.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:gnome-btdownload       ########################################### [100%]
[tchung@localhost download]$

Here is a test download for Fedora Torrent Files using Gnome BitTorrent Downloader from http://torrent.linux.duke.edu/:

CHANGELOG

* Sat Oct 23 2004 - Rebuild for FC1 (0.0.6-0.FC1)