Re: [gnome-love] request for spec files

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 09:48:17 -0500, Curtis Hovey <sinzui cox net> wrote:
> 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.

I was more thinking along the lines of 'a call to investigate the
technical feasibility of restarting the gpp', but yes.

> Instead
> of providing packages, the project could have new singular goal of
> creating and maintaining sets of spec files.

Well, the goal would still be to provide packages, but the mechanism
would be different.

>  That is still a lot of
> work by a good number of people.

Of course. My hope is that with a 'tinderbox' for rpms builds, it
would be something that might be something easier to maintain after
the initial effort.

> 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.

Ideally, yes.

> 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?

It has been open for nearly a year now, I believe:

http://primates.ximian.com/~thunder/bb/

We've had a system with it (gnome-build.ximian.com) basically world
accessible for a while, but the effort to use it stalled out- I guess
it has a bit of a learning curve.

Luis