hello,

i'm wondering what's the mechanism that large vendors such as novell,debian,ubuntu ..etc , use in order to compile their distros ?

i assume it's some automation of rpmbuild ...

cheers

Most likely use scripts to build each of their packages, much like slackware does.

+1

DebianLive, and I assume the normal Debian although I may be wrong, uses scripts to build the system.

okay , so you mean some ordinary bash scripts or something like Makefiles ?

well i remember that slackware doesn't use rpm , so i guess you're talking about binary tarballs, right ?

You might find these interesting:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Debian-Bin...WTO/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/RPM-HOWTO/index.html

I mean DebianLive. Google it and read up on it you will find it interesting.

Yeah they use bash scripts, sorry I should have been a bit more clear on that one. I think rpm's might be a binary tarball as well, just a different type, I can't be 100% on that though. Slackware have all the scripts used to build each package in the source directory on the disc or source directory where you download it from.

That way you can change a few things in each of the script to suit your requirements, and then do a complete rebuild of all the packages.

I did at one stage make a bash script to go and find all the scripts, change what I needed, then go through each directory and run the scripts to remake all the packages. If you want to make your own distro, this would be an easy way to do it.

well it's a live distro , what a surprise...

i'm not quite sure how that is irrelevant , btw i've read some of its docs on the official website , which does mention commands for compiling it but it doesn't talk about the technology behind it ...

i'm not interested in any particular distro instead i'm interested in the methodology used to compile them.

good to know.

however i'd exempt slackware from the question above , since it's rather simplistic and uncomplicated from a development perspective.
i doubt though that large distros such as ubuntu , fedora, opensuse rely just on simple scripts to compile thousands of packages.

now i'm aware that large distros unlike slackware are package managed through things like rpm.
although rpm is great for single packages , it isn't enough for packaging distros.

so a clearer question would be : what rpm(or whatever package management system is used) supplement is needed in order to build and package the large mainstream distros ?

cheers

You could also have a look here for the openSUSE build service. I don't know what SLES/SLED do, but I'd bet that it is a variant of that.