Re: Gnome spec files: nobody has made any promises about them.

[Toralf Lund <toralf kscanners com>]

> I>I think there is need for some clarification from the gnome team on
> >this.  In many cases in the past, this did not work for me and building
> >RPMS this way totally hosed my installation of Gnome. The RedHat rpms
> >were configured with a different set of options and there were serious
> >problems combining rpms built from RedHat spec and  rpms built from the
> >gnome spec files.
>
> >I discussed this with Miguel about gmc and it became clear that the
> >gnome folks never had any intention of adjusting their spec files to
> >match the RedHat spec files, and in fact, many people on this list have
> >referred to the RedHat preoccupation with the file system standard and
> >the complication of putting the corba files in /etc/CORBA rather than
> >the default configuration of /usr/etc/CORBA or whatever.  The RedHat
> >package maintainers made changes in their spec files that never showed
> >up in the Gnome spec files.
>
> >It could be I'm just troubled by ancient history.  I've not dug into
> >this during the last 6 months, but I've not seen any declaration either
> >that the Gnome package maintainers are promising their spec files will
> >work in a way that is consistent with RedHat systems, or even that their
> >spec files are up to date.  Sometimes you could open the spec file and
> >it does not even apply to the version of the program with which it was
> >shipped.
>
> >As a result of my experience, I cringe whenever anybody recommends a
> >simple "rpm -ta xxx".  ANybody building an rpm should at least untar the
> >package and inspect the spec file to see if it is up-to-date.
>
> For the last several months, I've been submitting patches and sometimes new
> SPEC files to keep GNOME in sync with Red Hat changes.
>
> I'm only aware of two packages where the Red Hat and the GNOME SPEC files are
> more than trivially out of sync: mc and gdm (but I've posted preliminary
> patches to help rectify the latter).

It looks like RedHat has made some changes to the actual code as well, though,
notably to the initialization of the panel menus. It would be nice if these were
integrated into the GNOME base source, too. I tried to take up this subject on
the mailing list a while back, but got no response.

- Toralf