Re: Yet another newbie

[Gleef <dzol virtual-yellow com>]

On Sun, 7 Feb 1999 bob@kehs.ksd.org wrote:
> Looking through cvs, there are spec files that dont make it into the
> balls. I have to grab the balls, go into cvs, grab the specs, change the
> version numbers in the specs, place them into the balls, and then build
> the rpms. The specs should be in the balls in the first place. If they do
> use a make <whatever> to generate the tarballs, the makefile or whatever
> is flawed because it does not include the spec that is already there. This
> should be considered a bug.

Yup, and it's probably an easy-to-fix bug too.  If you see a tarball that
doesn't include the spec file, first make sure there IS a spec file
(check cvs.gnome.org if you don't want to download the CVS source).  If
there is, than the problem usually is that the EXTRA_DIST line in 
Makefile.am is missing or incomplete.  There should be line in
Makefile.am which says:
EXTRA_DIST = <various stuff> <packagename>.spec

For example, in gnome-libs, it is:
EXTRA_DIST = HACKING gnomeConf.sh.in gnome-bug.in gnome-config.in \
             gnome-libs.spec

Patches to Makefile.am and <whatever>.spec are gladly taken.

Secondly, being specific is very useful in a bug report.  Above you said
"Looking through cvs, there are spec files that dont make it into the 
[tar]balls."  That doesn't tell anybody what the problem is, merely that
there is one.  Since you've already gone through the effort to look, why
not go that one extra step and actually tell what the problem is, for
example:
"Looking through cvs, I see that the foo, bar and baz sources have spec
files that never made it into the tarball, there may be others."


> I am reading up on how to make specs but I am not good enough at it yet.
> It will take me a while because I have little time to do it right now.
> (Hence not wanting to compile gnome for each one of my computers. I
> just want to compile it once for all.)

I strongly recommend Maximum RPM, it is complete, informative and very 
well written. You can download the postscript version from:
   http://www.rpm.org/maximum-rpm.ps.gz
 
Best of Luck,
-Gleef