Macros available in Fedora but not RHEL <= 4: Create epel-rpm-config?

[Dag Wieers]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:

> On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 14:11 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > There are a couple of useful macros available in Fedora >=5 (maybe
> > even 4) due to the higher rpm version like the bcond macros and maybe
> > more.
> > 
> > If a Fedora package uses these macros then for RHEL5 there is no
> > problem, but it breaks on RHEL4 and RHEL3. The fast way out is to add
> > the macro definitions at the top of the specfile.
> > 
> > But this will fork specfiles for no real reason, I'd rather see
> > keeping the same specfile for EPEL and Fedora (unless
> > abi/api/stability force chosing another version for EPEL than for
> > Fedora).
> > 
> > Could we have the few macros available in Fedora but not older RHEL
> > releases placed in an epel-rpm-config package and have this be part of
> > the default build chroots? That way EPEL builds are more compatible to
> > conventional Fedora builds.
> 
> This seems to make sense to me, +1.

+1 for me with one remark to not make it EPEL specific.

Also, would it be possible to have macros per distribution like RPMforge 
is doing ?

So that something like this becomes possible:

  %{?el3:%define _without_alsa 1}

  %{!?_without_alsa:BuildRequires: alsa-lib-devel}

I understand this is another item that may cause a fierce battle between 
proponents and opponents. It makes it much shorter and less obtrusive to 
use these macros.

Thanks in advance,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]