Re: Universal spec.in's

[David Elliott <dfe infinite-internet net>]

Dan Mueth wrote:

> I've been thinking about how we could set up a system to produce RPM's for
> various RPM-based distributions...
>
> How hard would it be to create an autoconf macro that detected your
> distribution and defined a set of variables which get substituted into the
> spec file at configure time?  It seems like it would be a bit of work but
> quite doable.
>

First off, this really would suck because you'd have to untar the package,
run configure, then grab the spec file out of it to make the rpm.  That is
not cool.  It's bad enough that there is already a .spec.in for the packages
and autoconf generates a .spec.  Although that is not such a bad thing since
it keeps the version number synched up when autoconf is run, which is always
true for a release source tarball.

>
> Or is there some reason why this is harder than it sounds?
>

I think this is major overkill.  RPM has macros like _bindir and _mandir and
so forth.  Simply %define _prefix /whatever/prefix/we/want and then use the
macros.

For the most part the main problem you are going to have with different rpm
based distros is different libc and other library versions.  But that is only
an issue for binary packages.  Source packages should be able to be rebuilt
on any RPM system, and the only differences you will likely encounter is
where stuff is installed.  Like /usr/man vs. /usr/share/man.

There are other issues like what libraries are available, but we should
really standardize on a set of libraries used and functionality provided.  It
would not be good to not allow SuSE users to have gif icons because libgif is
not part of the default SuSE distribution.  Of course that is a totally
ridiculous example because SuSE is pretty much every package including
kitchen-sink-1.0.noarch.rpm.

>
> Dan
>

-Dave