Re: Creating .spec files

[Christian Lohmaier <cloph cup uni-muenchen de>]

Hi *,

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 05:30:08PM -0800, Michael A. Peters wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 13:19, Christian Lohmaier wrote:
> 
> > And "manually create" - does this mean you had to create the list before
> > you could build successful?
> > Then this is not an option.
> > Setting up the rpm-environment (~/.rpmrc and ~/.rpmmacros) should be the
    ^^^^^^^^^^                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > only prerequisites. Then a "rpm -ba package.spec" should work out of the
> > box.                ^^^^                                 °°^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    ^^^
> Yes it should.
> The problem is that the find_lang macro doesn't find the language
> specific scrollkeeper files.

I understand, but...
 
> When rpm gets patched to fix that - then no more manual file will be
> needed - but until then, it is not appropriate to use a custom macro.

Here I disagree.

> The reason being - the custom macro will only exist on your system,
> preventing the rpm from building on other distro's.

Not necessarily. My position regarding the GPP is the following:
It is unlikely that $user will only build one single package of the
gnome-distribution (the desktop-release and maybe fifth toe), he/she
will probably build a whole bunch of packages (probably has to do this
to fullfill all the dependencies).

Giving this assumption that GPP's goal is to provide binary packages I
don't think that the requirement of putting an .rpmmacros file in the
$user's homedirectory is too much.

> By creating a lang file manually for that (even with a script in your
> ~/bin directory)

No way, no external script, just the extended %find_lang macro in the
.rpmmacros file.

> - you can include it in the src.rpm and anyone can
> build your src.rpm with rpmbuild --rebuild foobar.src.rpm

What you do here is: unnecessarily alter the Source, making it
impossible to build a rpm out of a tarball. 

Furthermore, you have to regenerate the list for every version, or at
least you will have to verify whether the list is still valid.

I don't like that at all. Then better list the omf-directory manually in
the %files section.

The main advantage of the %find_lang macro is that you can keep the
%files section short, there's no other gain from this.

> The scrollkeeper specific language file is included in the src.rpm as a
> source - right along with the source tarball and any patches.

But it is then not possible to build from the tarball, you'll have to
keep an eye on it for every release, etc.
(((and patches should not be necessary - I know that right now this cannot
be avoided especially for gstreamer when setting compilerflags, but the
pathes should go into the source...)))

> Once rpm itself adds that functionality to their find_lang macro - then
> you can just require the version of rpm that has it in the BuildRequires

That is even worse! Bumping the rpm-version required just to make use of
an improved set of macros is definitely not a thing that I would
support.

> section - so that people with older rpm will at least have a clue as to
> why it fails, and not have to hunt for your custom macro.

The macro (a sample/template .rpmmacros and .rpmrc) should be provided
to people interesting in creating Gnome-RPMs.

But If you don't want this approach, then just leave the automatism away
that doesn't come with any benefit and specify the files manually.
Besides that the %files section will become slightly larger ther will be
no side-effects.

I strongly vote against specifying an extra Source just containing a
list of files.

ciao
Christian
-- 
NP: Paradise Lost - Weeping Words