Creating RPM .spec Files From Scratch Using Vim

On a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora (or compatible) system execute

$ vim example.spec

This will create a new file with all the important sections and fields already there. The template used is /usr/share/vim/vimfiles/template.spec and is part of the vim-common RPM package.

This is very useful trick which I didn't know. Until now I always used the spec files from previously built packages when creating new RPMs. This wasn't as fast as creating a template and filling in the blanks.

For a detailed description about recommended RPM build practices see the Fedora Packaging Guidelines.