LottaNZB

The Fedora packages for LottaNZB on this website never had a high quality due to the fact that I didn’t know much about RPM packaging and personally didn’t use Fedora. Whenever a new version of LottaNZB was released, I fired up VirtualBox and launched the virtual Fedora 9 installation in order to build the RPM package and give it a quick try (which was overall quite annoying). There were several problems: For instance, it wasn’t possible to install the LottaNZB package on the recently released Fedora 11. Additionally, the Fedora download page asked users to grab the HellaNZB and unrar package and install it. I didn’t even notice that the newest version of HellaNZB has been part of Fedora’s repositories for quite a while and unrar packages can be found in the RPMFusion repositories.

I’m happy to announce that the situation is going to be much better starting today! In collaboration with PabloTwo and leigh123linux, two awesome guys on the Fedora Forum, a proper SPEC file was created for LottaNZB, which is used to build RPM packages from source tarballs. Next, I learned about Koji, a Fedora service similar to Ubuntu’s PPA feature that makes it possible to build RPMs for different versions of Fedora on their servers. It turned out to be incredibly easy to use! I also created a Fedora-specific patch for LottaNZB that makes sure that LottaNZB plays nicely with the HellaNZB package shipped with Fedora. This package doesn’t depend on unrar, which means that the automatic extraction of downloads is not enabled by default.

Using Koji, I created one LottaNZB package for Fedora 9, one for Fedora 10 and one for the latest release, Fedora 11.

Get the one that fits you from the Fedora download page now and tell me if it works for you!

Packagers of other RPM-based distributions are recommended to use the SPEC file that can be found in LottaNZB’s code repository. It probably won’t require much changes to adapt it to your distribution!