RPMs Farm Volunteers Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the "Mandriva Club Volunteers"?

"Mandriva Club Volunteers" are some kind of Mandriva Club "elite": these folks enjoy building RPMs in their spare time, and are ready to build packages for other Club members. They are granted an access for uploading new applications.

How can I become a Volunteer?

The best way to become a volunteer is to contact one of the active volunteers or Mandriva Club team and offer your help.

While you are at it, join the volunteers mailing list by sending an email to with "subscribe club-volunteers" in the body.

How do I upload an application?

As a volunteer, you will receive an account on the "club-uploads" server to upload RPMs. Uploads are performed with "scp", or "rsync + ssh". Each volunteer has a dedicated directory tree on the server.

ex: $scp gaim-0.80.mdk.i586.rpm [email protected]:~/Volunteer/{1}/{2}/i586/

Note: mylogin may be different than the one on club.

• {1} is the status. It can be:
  • in progress - If you plan to make the RPM.
  • test - The RPM is in testing stage. Club members may evaluate it. Put the RPM in "testing" on Club
  • free - the rpm is ok. It will be mirrored. Put the RPM in 'done' on Club.
• {2} - The version (Mandriva Linux release): ranges from 8.2 to 10.1
• You may put the i586||PPC||AMD64||SRPMS RPM in the directory of the same name.
  • noarch RPM now must be put in the i586 directory. Warning : It won't work on club if there is no Source RPM

Thanks a lot for your contributions !

It's important to understand the hierarchy used for uploading:

1. Assuming your username is "Joe", you'll upload to subdirectories of "/var/VolunteerCLUB/Joe/".
2. Within this directory are four subdirectories named "comm", "free", "non-us", and "test". Each new RPM must go into "test" first. Then after successful testing it can be moved to "free" (free software), "comm" (commercial programs), or "non-us" (free software which is problematic in the US for legal reasons).
3. Each directory contains folders for each Mandriva Linux release version (9.2, 10.0 etc.)
4. Finally, there is one subdirectory for each of the supported architectures (i586, ppc, etc.), and one for SRPMS inside of each of the above mentioned directories.

RPM-voting system administration

The voting life-cycle of an application has four distinct states: "requested", "in progress", "testing", and "done".

Here is how the system works:

1. Each club member can request an application, or vote for an application that is in "requested" state.
2. Each volunteer can "reserve" an application by marking it "in progress". The moment an application is marked "in progress", that packager is the only person who can change its status (besides the administration team).
3. As soon as you have reserved an application, you can start building the RPMs. Once the RPMs and SRPMs are uploaded and have been propagated to Mandriva Club (1-2 hours delay), you can put them in "testing" status. In case you fail to produce RPMs for any reason, please put the application back to "requested" status!
4. Assuming that testing has been positive, applications can then be uploaded to "free", "non-us", or "comm" directory. You can then change its status to "done". (Please note that "done" status has not been implemented yet!)

Do I have to build most-requested applications first?

Nope. You are a volunteer, and you have every right to ignore any requests that you don't like. However, the voting system is an indication of how many people would be happy to see a particular application packaged, and we want to make as many users as possible happy, don't we? .-)

What is our relation to cooker?

The relationship between Mandriva Club's contributions and Cooker's will hopefully be a very positive one:

1. Quite often, all that's needed to fulfill a request will be simply recompiling the cooker source-RPM for the stable distribution.
2. In case the application doesn't exist in cooker (or cooker/contributions) yet, please send an email to the cooker mailing list saying "I'll build this application for Mandriva Club", and then go ahead and build it. Once you are done, we will take the package and add it to cooker/contributions too.
3. In case the Cooker version of an application is too old for your taste, please contact the maintainer before building a newer version. He may already be building it!
4. From time to time, you will find that Cooker SRPMs have bugs. In this case, get in touch with the maintainer of this RPM and give him your fixes.
5. In case you need to change anything in the spec-file to get it to built on the stable distribution, please do it in such a way that the SRPM still builds on Cooker! (and send your changes to the maintainer)