Encouraging the use of multiple packaging systems on one systems, and the resulting problems

[Davide Bolcioni]

Michael A. Peters wrote:

> Some upstream tarballs contain a generic spec file that works on most
> systems - then you can just do
> 
> rpmbuild -ta foo.tar.gz
> 
> but I've actually found quite a few that have packaging errors
> themselves. Then there's issue where DESTDIR support is not always
> proper and some patches to the Makefile need to be added, gnome
> applications will require you to disable gconf updating during the
> install and do it in the post script, etc.

Is there some place where such common errors are exposed ? It would help
newcomers like myself a lot.

> Users should not be expected to learn how to package rpm's unless they
> need to learn it for another reason. I do think that developers should
> learn rpm so they can provide a *quality* generic spec file, some spec
> files I've seen are just scary (and often not generated by autoconf so
> the version ends up being wrong if they don't remember to manually
> update it for a new release)

Another interesting point ... how do you generate a .spec through 
autoconf ? Any examples or tutorials ?

Thank you for your consideration,
Davide Bolcioni
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