Re: Moving to a more distro/host agnostic setup for the canonical spec files.

[Paul Jenner <psj home ntlworld com>]

On Fri, 2003-01-10 at 09:15, Yanko Kaneti wrote:
> Here is a packaging/spec idea I'll throw at the wind to seek some
> general reaction and possibly action.

Note sure how useful this response is since it isn't tech as I don't
have to maintain GNOME packages but...

As a user of GNOME, I find the distribution of good spec files in all
the GNOME distributed software invaluable. Anything that can both ease
maintenance of the specs, make them more likely to work on all systems
and distros "out of the box" and make them more LSB friendly has to be a
good thing.

As a user of many spec files over time, I find myself having to hack a
lot around the "tricks" and hard-coded specifics that Yanko describes to
get many RPMs to build cleanly (not GNOME I add :-). A schema for
well-written specs using clean macros should sort most of these
problems, I agree.

However - I am not sure how the approach of distributing custom macros
in a required separate package compares to simply cleaning and
standardising the specs then distributing them self-contained. In other
words, I have the gut feeling that a well written spec should be able to
build on any system without the user having to install an entire
separate package of macros first. GNU doesn't require that a user has
installed autoconf and friends to build autoconf-based software - they
designed autoconf to be used by the maintainer prior to distribution so
the user would only have to run a system independent script to configure
the software. A similar approach with spec files would be nicer if
possible.

Just my thoughts as a user...

Paul