RPM's are bad

[Dennis Bjorklund <dennisb cs chalmers se>]

A lot (most) of the packages in gnome have spec files to build RPM
packages. And this is very good. But there is a lot of things that can be
better. And I'd like to change some of these things.

* In many spec files there is a section changelog which often contains
changelog-entries from years ago. These should go..

* In many packages there is NEWS, ChangeLog, TODO and somilar textfiles
that the spec files specifies should go inte the binary package. But most
times these files does not contain anything and if they do the information
is old. Look at the NEWS file in gnome-libs-1.2.7 as an example.

These two things are simple to solve.

A harder problems is that we would like to have packages that can be
installed with different versions in the same time. I have gnome-print
0.20 installed and I have other packages that needs
/usr/lib/libgnomeprint.so.6. So now I cant upgrade to gnome-print-0.24 and
therefore I cant use newer programs that needs 0.24.

This is of course not only a RPM problem but the ones that create the spec
also files need to think about it.

By the way. The spec in gnome-print-0.24 does not work at all, I've fixed
it here to build it myself but I havn't sent it to anyone. I've tried the
bug-track system before and it was no nice experiance.. 

I would very much prefere to have a couple of mailinglists for each
package. For example gnome-print, gnome-print-devel,
gnome-print-patches. And then people can send patches tho the correct list
and other can discuss them in the devel list and the maintainer can apply
them. This method works very well in other projects. I've several times
tried to get in touch with maintainers of different packages and send
patches and in some cases it have worked in others i've not gotten any
replies at all.. It's better with a mailinglist then other people can also
look at patches and say wath they think about them..

/Dennis