Building birdie -- a Twitter client -- for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta

Birdie is a beautiful, new Twitter client for the Linux desktop that is not included as official software in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta. This post details the steps I followed, and a few of the issues faced when building and packaging birdie for RHEL7 Beta.

Setting up your build environment

Starting with a clean install of the RHEL7 Beta Workstation, install the Development Tools group, and the rpmdevtools package with the commands:

sudo yum groupinstall "Development tools"
sudo yum install rpmdevtools

Next, setup the rpmbuild directory in your home directory with the command:

rpmdev-setuptree

Get the birdie source

Download the birdie source from GitHub using the command

git clone https://github.com/birdieapp/birdie.git

The main branch of birdie contains GNOME and GTK features not available to us, so we need to use the "legacy" branch of birdie. Use the following commands to switch to the legacy branch, and to create a tarball of the birdie legacy branch source:

cd birdie
git checkout legacy
git archive --format=tar.gz --prefix=birdie-1.1/ legacy > birdie-1.1.tar.gz

Now, copy the newly created birdie tarball into the SOURCES directory in the ~/rpmbuild directory.

cp birdie-1.1.tar.gz ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/

Getting and editing the birdie Specfile

Since birdie is in Fedora, we are now going to grab the srpm from the upstream Fedora package, and extract the specfile out of it. First, download the srpm:

wget https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//packages/birdie/1.1/1.fc20/src/birdie-1.1-1.fc20.src.rpm

Then extract the specfile from the srpm, and copy it to the ~/rpmbuild/SPECS directory with:

rpm2cpio birdie-1.1-1.fc20.src.rpm | cpio -id "birdie.spec"
cp birdie.spec ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/

Finally, because the Fedora birdie builds against birdie trunk/master, not the legacy branch we want, we need to change a few build dependencies in the specfile for birdie to build on RHEL7 Beta. Remove the following lines in birdie.spec

BuildRequires: gtk3-devel >= 3.10
BuildRequires: vala-devel >= 0.22.1

and change them to

BuildRequires: gtk3-devel
BuildRequires: vala-devel
BuildRequires: libwnck3-devel

Additionally, change the following two lines from:

%{_datadir}/glib-2.0/schemas/org.birdieapp.birdie.gschema.xml
%{_datadir}/appdata/%{name}.appdata.xml

to

%{_datadir}/glib-2.0/schemas/org.*.birdie.gschema.xml
#%{_datadir}/appdata/%{name}.appdata.xml

Attempt to build the birdie rpm

First up, we need to install all the build dependencies that birdie requires to build. To do this, use the command:

sudo yum-builddep ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/birdie.spec

then build the birdie binary locally with:

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/birdie.spec

However, this build will most likely fail, with the following error (it will be in the scroll back a ways)

error: Package `Dbusmenu-0.4' not found in specified Vala API directories or GObject-Introspection GIR directories

Turns out, Birdie Legacy actually requires the libdbusmenu-devel package as a builddep too.

Building libdbusmenu

libdbusmenu is not available in RHEL7 Beta, so we have to build that one from the source too. First, change into the SRPM directory in ~/rpmbuild. and download the SRPM from Fedora:

cd ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/
wget https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//packages/libdbusmenu/12.10.2/5.fc20/src/libdbusmenu-12.10.2-5.fc20.src.rpm

Install the builddeps for, then build the libdbusmenu packages:

sudo yum-builddep ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/libdbusmenu-12.10.2-5.fc20.src.rpm
rpmbuild --rebuild ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/libdbusmenu-12.10.2-5.fc20.src.rpm

Then install what we just built. First, the libdbusmenu package, followed by the libdbusmenu-devel package.

sudo yum localinstall ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/libdbusmenu-12.10.2-5.el7.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/libdbusmenu-devel-12.10.2-5.el7.x86_64.rpm

Try the birdie build again

Use the same command as before to build the birdie binary:

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/birdie.spec

Now, once the package is built, you should be able to install birdie with:

sudo yum localinstall ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/birdie-1.1-1.el7.x86_64.rpm

To start birdie, either type "birdie" in the command line, or find it in the Applications menu under the Internet category.

Alternatively, just install birdie.

If you just want to install birdie, and not bother about building it yourself, there is a COPR repo set up to install a pre-built version of Birdie for RHEL7 Beta.

First, enable the repo on your system:

sudo curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/birdie-rhel7.repo https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/ryanlerch/birdie/repo/epel-7-x86_64/

Then install birdie with:

sudo yum install birdie

If you want to learn more about COPR, you should go check out this post which will show you how to get an account and get things built that you can share with others.