Re: [gnome-love] request for spec files

[Curtis Hovey <sinzui cox net>]

On Sat, 2005-02-12 at 07:30 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 04:59:14 -0500, Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 11:08:33PM -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> > > In a nutshell, i'd like to hack jhbuild to build tarballs and rpms,
> > > but that would require pulling spec files for each tarball from a
> > > predictable location in CVS.
> >
> >   I actually keep my spec file in CVS for my projects, though some
> > seems to consider this "useless" if not bad practice.
> >
> > > It would also require someone with knowledge/experience in writing
> > > spec files to volunteer to write up-to-date spec files for at least
> > > some small number of modules, and get them in CVS, so that I could
> > > test them, and ideally volunteer to help me with problems as they crop
> > > up.
> >
> >   Problem is to have portable spec files, all major RPM distro seems
> > to have their prefered guidelines and tricks,
>
> Ah, yeah, I forgot to mention that. Certainly our experience at Ximian
> was that you needed separate spec files per distro; I'm not sure the
> best way to maintain that in CVS, but it is something I had hoped you
> guys had considered.

This sounds like a call to restart the GNOME Packaging project. Instead
of providing packages, the project could have new singular goal of
creating and maintaining sets of spec files.  That is still a lot of
work by a good number of people.

I'm not familiar with many packaging systems, but isn't possible to jump
start this effort by collection the spec files from each distro's source
packages.

I recall that Ximian has a unified spec/build process that creates
packages for different distros.  Was there ever any thought to releasing
that code?  Ximian Desktop doesn't appear to be multi-distro anymore; is
there a business case not to open it up?



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sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.