This is an unofficial package designed for Fedora that packages Mendeley Desktop freely available from the web.
It attempts to maximize the use of system libraries and to adhere to Fedora guidelines.
The only files I wrote were the .spec and a fresh mendeleydesktop executable (that essentially does nothing). Therefore I won't bother putting a license on my files. The license for the files obtained from Mendeley is included as part of this install.
Easy way: https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/hmaarrfk/mendeleydesktop/
Hard way: Build the RPM yourself.
Download the "source" (really a binary from mendeley) and run the ./package-mendeley-rpm.sh script Then use mock on the source rpm.
The issue of having an RPM has been raised to Mendeley in the past: General Linux 2012 http://support.mendeley.com/customer/portal/questions/567256-linux-make-a-linux-installer Gentoo 2012 http://support.mendeley.com/customer/portal/questions/199131-on-distribution-policy-and-download-link Fedora 2013 http://support.mendeley.com/customer/portal/questions/758741-packaging-for-fedora
The first version was written by Mark Harfouche 2013.01.21
A few collaborators helped along the way
Chris Fallin
Filipe Manco
Git Repository at: https://github.com/hmaarrfk/mendeley-rpm
Get ther tarball from mendeley.com
It might be instructive to look at what was done by the Gentoo community. http://gentoo-overlays.zugaina.org/funtoo/sci-misc.html.en#mendeleydesktop
Looking at their .ebuild script (seems to be the equivalent of a spec file) http://data.gpo.zugaina.org/funtoo/sci-misc/mendeleydesktop/mendeleydesktop-1.9.1.ebuild they have a different strategy to deal with the system QT vs bundled qt problem.
sed -i "s:sys.argv.count("--force-system-qt") > 0:True:"
bin/mendeleydesktop || die "failed to patch startup script"
sed -i
-e "s:lib/mendeleydesktop:$(get_libdir)/mendeleydesktop:g"
-e "s:MENDELEY_BASE_PATH + "/lib/":MENDELEY_BASE_PATH + "/$(get_libdir)/":g"
bin/mendeleydesktop || die "failed to patch library path"
Honestly, I think we might be doing it better since we don't install into /opt. I always feel like installing into /opt is a hack.
Then again, they don't like packaging noobs like we are :D.