Re: Cross Distro Spec Files

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

Hi *,

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 01:35:13PM -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 6/15/05, Christian Lohmaier <cloph cup uni-muenchen de> wrote:
> > Distros will build their own packages anyway.
> 
> To be very clear here (partially in response to Greg's email)- my goal
> here, and what I think should be this group's goal, is *not* to
> produce spec files distros or even necessarily end-users can use[1].

Not sure what you mean with end-users. In my definition the end-user is
the person that installs and uses the package.
I think we should target these users.

The "end-users" that will make use of the gpp provided ones are not the
newbies. The newbies should stick with their distribution. The end-users
we should target are the curious ones, that want to try things out or
the ones that need to compile everything themselves.

> My goal (and again, I think what should be this group's goal) is to
> produce packages of gnome's stable and unstable[2] releases that the
> gnome project can distribute to testers and users.

That would mean to create binary packages.. One reason more against the
distro-switch approach.

> Spec files (of
> whatever sort) are only a means to that end, so 'clean' doesn't matter
> as long as the packages work for the testers/users and the specs can
> be maintained by volunteer humans. That's MNSHO anyway.
> 
> So... if someone has a different way to produce packages easily and
> maintainably across distros that is different from James' solution,
> speak up :)[3]

Well, I thought I did...
Basically it is just a matter what you require from the builder.
If you can make him to configure the rpm to use a certain set of macros
and don't worry about the split of packages (e.g. you'll insatll all the
files a "make install" would do without differentiating between "main"
package and "devel" package) all you have to do is decide where to put
the files I mentioned in my other post (mime, desktop, pkgconfig,..)

Then the spec file basically is reduced to 
%configure
%make
%makeinstall
%find_lang

If you're only up to a system where the files are "indexed" by rpm
there's no problem at all, no need to fuzz with distro-specific things
at all.
But still the points I mentioned need to be put down. (where to put the
special files, what macros should be allowed, ...)

ciao
Christian
-- 
NP: Ill Niño - I Am Loco