make tag and %{?dist}

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 11:27 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 10:00:22AM -0500, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> > > Except, if there are bad conventions - With all due respect, what you
> > > described its waaaaay toooo complicated and means asking for trouble.
> > Adding two lines to the top of a spec file is too complicated? :)
> 
> To every spec file, yeah, it's kind of a complication.

Exactly - furthermore, Tom's proposal leaves too much freedom. This
freedom is the cause of this (avoidable) discussion.

Why not keeping things simple to users?
Just tell them: Any package in FE must use a Release-Tag of this form
"Release: XYZ%{dist}" or whatever you prefer.

To me the point in using dist-tags as a package maintainer is being able
keep the differences for the same package in different FE releases as
small as possible and to keep the release numbers conflict free and
steadily increasing.

As %{dist} currently is not provided by rpm-macros, I am using hard
coded {.fc3|.fc4} to enable users to be able to rebuild the rpms.

Cluttering spec files with constructs like 
%define fedora 3
%{?!dist:%define dist .fc3}
and the like to me is simply beyond reason.

> > > Instead, implement one, single, mandatory convention or even let the
> > > buildsystem automatically assign, "Release" numbers which are guaranteed
> > > to be steadily increasing and conflict-free between FC release.
> > The buildsystem does not automatically assign anything.
True, the buildsystem _currently_ does not assign anything, nothing that
couldn't be reconsidered and changed.

Other distribution's buildsystems do. They are using the release tag as
"buildnumber".

> > It builds packages, thats all it does.
Well, I agree assigning release tags during builds is arguable, because
they might probably better be automatically assigned as part of "spec
file submission" or "rebuild request".

> But this doesn't need to be in the buildsystem that Seth is making at all.
> It just needs to be in the redhat-rpm-config macros.
Though I am opposed to this "macro magic" in general, this would be a
viable solution.

Ralf