make tag and %{?dist}

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 09:28:03PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> Yeah, but that "scary macro voodoo" is something I want to avoid, and it
> doesn't really solve the problem.  That would just define %{dist} to
> whatever version of the distro the user had installed at the time.

Right.... what's wrong with that? In fact, isn't it the point?

> Perhaps the make targets in CVS could define %{dist} for the user based
> on what branch the command is being run.  For example, if you run 'make
> i386' in the devel branch %{dist} gets defined to ".fc4" automatically.
> Similarly, if you run it in the FC-3 branch, it gets defined to ".fc3".

So that way, when you accidentally build the package from the wrong branch,
it gets tagged with with the wrong tag for the build, and if you don't
notice, your final file gets copied to the wrong place?

If your spec files are actually different across distro releases, I don't
think you wanna be using dist tags -- in that case, you hard-code it because
functional differences in the file effectively hard-code a distinction
anyway.

The dist tag provides a way so that it doesn't *matter* where you happen to
get the spec file from (since it's identical) and your package is still
built and clearly labelled as belonging on the release on which you built
it.


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
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