spec files (was Re: Domains)

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc cu-portland edu>]

This is on gnome-hackers, as there's nothing private about this

On 14 Mar 2001 08:58:54 -0500, jacob berkman wrote:
> On 14 Mar 2001 04:29:21 -0500, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 10:04:05AM +0100, Martin Baulig wrote:
> > > However, I was looking at LibGTop and GTop and their .spec files are all
> > > from 1999.
> > 
> >   Can we consider this a bug (at the maintainer level) ?
> > 
> > > And once this plain GNOME thingie is established, why do we need
> > > the .spec file in the packages at all ? If people want a .spec file, they
> > > will be able to find a working one there.
> > 
> >   Hum, spec files are generated usually from .spec.in
> 
> this is to get the paths right.

I don't think I've seen many which use this to generate the paths, and
by doing this, you make the spec file totally non-portable.  The best
things get generated are the version number (that's nice, as you only
have to change it one place per release), and the package name. 

> now, please consider that the paths vary between distributions.

RPM has some fairly standardized macros for defining file names in terms
of the local environment.  Not very many people use them, but I
certainly do, and they make things a lot easier to move spec files
across platforms.  I've even got some of my RH spec files building on my
Solaris RPM environment, and installing to /opt/sfw instead of /usr.
Same spec file.  So, it's not like it can't be done, it just takes
tweaking the environement a bit.

> also consider that the distros have different names for dependencies

Well, can't do a darn thing about that.  

> *THIS* is why tarball .spec files (in their current incarnation) simply
> won't work everywhere.



> that is not to say that we could do some really slick scripts somewhere
> to have the .spec file figure out things.  it is just to say that with
> the way we have them setup now, it just Won't Work, no matter how much
> the idea of being able to just rpm -ta a tarball appeals to all of us.

Well, it will only work for people who really know what they're doing,
unfortunately.  Not much I can do about that.

> this is a hard problem to solve.

But it's not insurmountable.  I don't have build hosts for anything
other than RH6.2 and 7.0, but if somebody wants to volunteer a few hours
of time on some other RPM systems, it's certainly possible to test out
these spec files, and find out how well they work on some of the more
excentric RPM based distros.

    Greg