How to package Python as RPM for install into /opt?

Question

How to create a binary RPM package out of Python 2.7.2 sources for installation into a non-standard prefix such as /opt/python27?

Assume the following builds correctly.

wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.7.2/Python-2.7.2.tgz
tar zxvf Python-2.7.2.tgz
cd Python-2.7.2
./configure --prefix=/opt/python27 --enable-shared
make
make test
sudo make install

Instead of the last command I'd like to build a binary RPM.

Answer 1

RPMs are built using rpmbuild from a .spec file. As an example, look at python.spec from Fedora.

If you don't need to build from sources then try rpm's --relocate switch on a pre-built RPM for your distribution:

rpm -i --relocate /usr=/opt/python27 python-2.7.rpm

Answer 2

It's probably a bit late to respond now, but I was trying to do something similar and I didn't want to use --relocate because my package was not made to install anywhere except into /opt.

The way I did it was add the following two lines:

 Prefix: /opt
 %define _prefix /opt/

Don't forget that you also need to update your %files section to reflect that it is now installing in /opt