13.9. History — RTEMS User Manual 5.4-rc2 (21st August 2026) documentation

# 13.9. History

The RTEMS Source Builder is a stand alone tool based on another tool called the SpecBuilder written by Chris Johns. The SpecBuilder was written around 2010 for the RTEMS project to provide Chris with a way to build tools on hosts that did not support RPMs. At the time the RTEMS tools maintainer only supported spec files and these files held all the vital configuration data needed to create suitable tool sets. The available SRPM and spec files by themselves where of little use because a suitable `rpm` tool was needed to use them. At the time the available versions of `rpm` for a number of non-RPM hosts were broken and randomly maintained. The solution Chris settled on was to use the spec files and to write a Python based tool that parsed the spec file format creating a shell script that could be run to build the package. The approach proved successful and Chris was able to track the RPM version of the RTEMS tools on a non-RPM host for a number of years.

The SpecBuilder tool did not build tools or packages unrelated to the RTEMS Project where no suitable spec file was available so another tool was needed. Rather than start again Chris decided to take the parsing code for the spec file format and build a new tool called the RTEMS Source Builder.