Proposal (and yes, I'm willing to do stuff!): Must Use More Macros

[Seth Vidal]

On Fri, 5 Jun 2009, Adam Williamson wrote:

> On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 11:43 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>
>> To some extent, yes.  macros can go overboard, though.  I think that the
>> macros you're planning are going to make sense, though :-)
>
> Thanks.
>
>> The way to get these changed is to first go through the Packaging
>> Committee to get the changes approved, then have the macros merged into
>> the packages that will provide them.  Then patch the packages that
>> should be updated.
>
> Would it be best to have the concrete implementation (or at least some
> examples) built before taking it to the packaging committee, or no?
>
>> Note: I remember one argument against macros being that they make spec
>> files harder to port between distros but I'm not willing to champion
>> that argument.  If someone else does, I'll certainly listen to the
>> reasoning, though. :-)
>
> The obvious answer to that is to try and standardize macro usage between
> distributions, not to not use macros. For e.g., I revamped the Mandriva
> Tcl packaging policy late last year: I took the macro names and even
> code snippets from Fedora's Tcl policy. I just implemented them as
> system-wide macros in the tcl-devel package instead of writing in the
> policy that they should be re-defined at the top of every spec file :)

Yah. let's get the rpm macros standardized at the lsb.....

-sv