We've quietly been working on a new project at rPath: rMake. rMake is a new tool for building software using Conary in a simple, controlled way. Before rMake, you had to install the right software on your system in order to use "cvc cook" to build a package. With rMake, a fresh clean build chroot is created automatically with everything a package needs to build--and only those items.

Today we released an initial ALPHA version of rMake. It's still under heavy development, so expect frequent releases with big changes.

To install rMake, you must be root. First, make sure to install Conary 1.0.16. Then install the info-rmake, info-rmake-chroot, and rmake packages by running:

conary update rmake --resolve --install-label conary.rpath.com@rpl:devel

There are currently two major components to rMake: the rMake Server and the rMake command line. The rMake Server runs as a daemon on your system. It accepts rMake build jobs, creates build environments, performs builds, and so on. The rMake command line controls the server. Use it to create new build jobs, view a list of jobs, view status and logs, and commit the resulting builds back to a Conary repository.

To start the rMake server, run /sbin/service rmake start as root.

To find out more about how rMake works, run man rmake and man rmakeserver.

If you are running rPath Linux, Foresight Linux, or another distribution that uses group-dist as the name of the group that defines the release, you should be able to build packages immediately. If you are running a distribution that does not use group-dist to name that group, you may have to edit the /etc/rmake/clientrc file and set the resolveTroves parameter. For example, if group-appliance is the group that defines a release of your system, then add this line to /etc/rmake/clientrc: resolveTroves group-appliance.

For more help, please see us on #conary on freenode!