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

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2009-06-06 at 11:49 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 10:31:23 -0700,
>   Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/ScriptletSnippets
> > 
> > it seems to me that this is a bit of a silly approach - it encourages
> > cut and paste errors (or people cutting and pasting non-canonical blocks
> > from other people's spec files), it just looks bad in spec files, and if
> > any of those snippets happens to need to be changed a bit - say, the
> > syntax for updating the desktop database changes, or something - we'd
> > have to adjust them in seven zillion different spec files.
> 
> It is error prone. When I started working on reviving the games spin, I found
> several packages that used those kinds of scripts without the proper pre
> requirements. In normal use you wouldn't see a problem, but when building
> live images trying to run scripts before coreutils was installed tended
> to cause problems.

Well, defining them as macros won't actually solve that, because the
macros wouldn't include the dependencies. So even if we do it, there'd
still have to be a note in the packaging guidelines to say 'when using
macro X, set dependency Y'.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net