Re: Red Hat packaging (and hello all)

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 09:18:15PM -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > On a final note:  I love writing specs and working out the build process and
> > designing really good packages, /BUT/ A 350 Mhz Pentium II is a bit slow at
> > compiling gnome.  Given that as previously mentioned an 800 Mhz machine
> > takes about a day to build gnome I would guess it would take my machine 2
> > days.
> 
> Yeah, this sucks.  I've been thinking about how to solve this one a bit,
> but I don't have a great solution, yet.  For our initial work, which
> will be scripts or hand packaging, this machine just needs a metric
> boatload of ram and disk, and a fast processor.  What I'd like to do is
> set things up so that if we each have accounts on this machine, we're
> not wasting too much disk space with 30 versions of the same source or
> binary packages.  I just haven't figured out how to do that yet.  :-)

For now, we could distribute the workload among us. E.g., I have a
RH7.1 machine (500Mhz, 128Mb); it is not top-of-the-line, but not too
bad, so I can grab the latest .src.rpm's and run rpm --rebuild * when
leaving my office on Friday night - so when I come back on Monday,
I'll have binary packages ready. That is, provided that the
compilation was error-free. 

What we need for now is a list of requirements for the .spec files to make
sure that they all have reasonable fields like Requires and
BuildRequires. We also need a detailed set of build instructions
for those who are not RPM/dpkg experts (e.g: what flags should be given to
RPM? should we produce RPM version 3 - as suggested by latest LSB
draft  - or RPM v 4, which is the newest one? etc).

Finally my pet peeve: "category" field of gnome PRM's is a mess. Here
is a partial list: 

control-center:     System Environment/Libraries
gnome-applets:      User Interface/Desktops
bug-buddy:          Applications/System
gnome-media         X11/Libraries
gnome-utils         Applications/System
gnome-guile:        X11/Gnome
gnome-audio:        System Environment/Libraries
gnome-core:         System Environment/Base
gdm2:               User Interface/X
Nautilus:           User Interface/Desktop
gphoto:             X11/Utilities

Note that for Nauilus, it is Desktop, while for many others it is
Desktops (plural). 

We need some better categorization, ideally matching the structure of
documentation tree in Scrollkeeper. I could work on that. Anyone wants
to join?

Sasha