Building latest git for CentOS

CentOS is a great operating system, but recent versions of software packages is not one of its virtues. For example the current CentOS 7.2 ships with git version 1.8.3 released 2013, almost 3 years ago. And by that time git gained quite some useful features. So lets see how to build RPMs with latest git.

RPM build chroot

First thing is to make a chroot where to build the RPM, because there are a lot of dependencies required for building, which needs to be cleaned up afterwards. Much easier is to just delete the whole chroot dir

First lets create the chroot directory and  initialize the  rpm database   :

mkdir /root/buildroot
rpm --root=/root/buildroot --rebuilddb

Next  install the latest centos-release package and yum inside :

rpm --root=/root/buildroot -i http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7.2.1511/os/x86_64/Packages/centos-release-7-2.1511.el7.centos.2.10.x86_64.rpm
yum --installroot=/root/buildroot install yum

Next we continue inside the chroot. Lucky us, systemd-nspawn makes it trivial to work inside the chroot :

systemd-nspawn -D /root/buildroot/

Building RPMs

Next we need to install gcc, and few other packages that are needed to compile RPMs .

yum install make gcc perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker  rpmdevtools curl-devel expat-devel gettext-devel openssl-devel zlib-devel

And now we need a git SRPM to build. We can just grab the Fedora one which has git 2.7.1. Here https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/git/overview/ are all Fedora builds, and I picked the Rawhide version. Clicking on it takes us to a page with build information and there is also a link to download the SRPM for this build. Lets install it :

rpm -i  https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//packages/git/2.7.1/1.fc24/src/git-2.7.1-1.fc24.src.rpm

You can just ignore the warning about missing users. Go to SPECS directory and try to build the RPMs:

cd rpmbuild/SPECS/
rpmbuild -ba git.spec

error: Failed build dependencies:
        asciidoc >= 8.4.1 is needed by git-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64
        xmlto is needed by git-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64
        desktop-file-utils is needed by git-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64
        emacs is needed by git-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64
        libgnome-keyring-devel is needed by git-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64
        pkgconfig(bash-completion) is needed by git-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64

Ok, we need to install some dependencies to be able to build. Lets just install them:

yum install asciidoc  xmlto desktop-file-utils emacs libgnome-keyring-devel pkgconfig bash-completion

and run rpmbuild again:

rpmbuild -ba git.spec

After the build finishes we have the RPMs in ~/rpmbuild/RPMS:

cd ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/
find
.
./noarch
./noarch/gitweb-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm
./noarch/gitk-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm
./noarch/git-email-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm
./noarch/git-gui-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm
./noarch/git-cvs-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm
./noarch/git-p4-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm
./noarch/perl-Git-SVN-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm
./noarch/git-all-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm
./noarch/perl-Git-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm
./x86_64
./x86_64/git-core-doc-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm
./x86_64/git-svn-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm
./x86_64/git-core-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm
./x86_64/git-daemon-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm
./x86_64/git-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm
./x86_64/git-debuginfo-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm

Exit the chroot and install the following packages for a minimal git installation:

yum install buildroot/root/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/git-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm buildroot/root/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/git-core-* buildroot/root/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/perl-Git-2.7.1-1.el7.centos.noarch.rpm

Not, so bad Next time I will check how to create a repository .