make tag and %{?dist}

Michael Schwendt bugs.michael at gmx.net
Wed May 4 11:32:57 UTC 2005


On Wed, 04 May 2005 06:05:40 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 10:24 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > On Tue, 03 May 2005 22:51:20 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > 
> > > For the actual RPM build, on the actual Red Hat build systems, this is
> > > how it would be/is done.  That is where the "scary macro voodoo" that
> > > Ignacio mentioned in another thread comes into play.
> > 
> > Revisiting the dist-tag related thread on fedora-packaging list would
> > make sense.  As long as I cannot store a single src.rpm revision in a
> > single branch and build this single src.rpm for multiple target
> > distributions, the system is flawed. It is more convenient to just
> > hardcode .fc4, .fc3 and friends in the spec file, because we duplicate
> > packages in multiple branch directories.
> 
> Sorry, I don't follow that list at the moment.  I'll have to dig around
> in the archives.
> 
> As for hardcoding being convenient, I disagree.  I think it's a pain.  I
> do not see why everyone should have to hardcode that when it could be
> done by the make targets.

Everything that is added to the tag on-the-fly is non-intuitive and bad.
I would not like it if cvs-import.sh altered my spec file, and I would not
like it if "make tag" used too much "magic" (like relying on CVS branch
directory file names instead of evaluating RPM macros).

A bigger pain for package developers is that they want to do mass-upgrades
for multiple distributions first. Only due to that comes their apparent
need to release a single src.rpm for multiple distribution versions. If
it's just the "Release" field that should be different, it takes only a
second to alter it prior to cvs commit.

At some point of time, most multi-dist spec files start introducing an
increasing number of dist-dependent macros. And that's where the real time
consuming maintenance requirements are.
 
> > > But, the process to get a package actually built on the Red Hat build
> > > systems from Fedora Extras CVS 
> > 
> > There is no such build system. Seth Vidal has been building packages with
> > the help of a few scripts and later a yum-ified mach, and he's working on
> > creating a tag-based automated build system, too. So far, tags have not
> > been necessary for any builds. But tags are useful, and hence they are
> > mentioned in the Hints section. Whether contributors revisit the Wiki
> > pages occasionally, I don't know.
> 
> Are you sure tags aren't currently needed?  Take a look at the tobuild
> file.  I certainly see tags listed there...  And if they aren't needed,
> how does the build system (aka Seth) know what to build?

Yes, I'm sure. We have not needed tags for building so far, since we
haven't used the tobuild file yet. It's only Seth who experiments with
it so far. We have requested builds via the Wiki. And it was me who
added the note about "make tag" to the documentation. ;)




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