You don’t need to install an RPM package just to get to the files. This can be especially useful if you’re looking for the default configuration files or docs from a package. You may have the package already installed and don’t want to reinstall it. It’s not pretty, and I wish rpm and yum provided a prettier method of extracting a file, but it works.

With rpmbuild, you can make custom packages for any architecture, but what if there’s no difference between the architectures in what you’re building. If you’re copying around something like scripts, docs or other text files that have nothing to do with 32 vs 64 bit or endianness, it’s easier and more efficient to create a single noarch package and just keep one copy of it in a repository.

Install the prerequisites noted in the README file if you’re building swfdec and swfdec-mozilla from scratch. I found I only needed to install liboil-devel and gstreamer-plugins-base-devel in order for it to build without complaint. When installing from binary on my 64-bit os, I found I was missing a lot of 32-bit packages needed by the plugin, so my dependencies needed by swfdec-mozilla.i386 rpm was long.

First I had to run dos2unix on all the files to get the right new line chars. Then I had to find a patch to fix the kernel-rt problem with the linux-vdso.so.1 missing messages. I found I could run MakeSpec.py and Build.py to compile python scripts into executables after patching. Here’s what the patch does.