rpm groups and fedora: a modest proposal

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Fri May 28 15:01:21 UTC 2004


On Fri, 28 May 2004, Panu Matilainen wrote:

>> but you'd rather edit a spec file and rebuild an rpm to do it?
>
> Yes.

It seems to me that the hardwiring solution will lead either to more 
bickering among distros or more complexity for upstream developers:

a) If groups change between distro revs, the package's .spec doesn't
    have to maintain a silly set of %if statements to set the correct
    group for each distribution release.

b) The maintainer of the .spec -- who, in an ideal world, is the
    upstream developer -- needn't worry about inter-distribution
    politics (or take sides) when setting the group header.

Plus, a separate resource like comps.xml makes it reasonably easy for 
a package to maintain multiple group memberships.

That's not to say that comps.xml is a wonderful solution -- but at 
least it allows each distro/rev some independence.

-- Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>





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