Re: tutorial for building rpms?

[Enrico Scholz <enrico scholz informatik tu-chemnitz de>]

epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk (Edward Avis) writes:

> SuSE do a good job of packaging apps to fit nicely into their
> distribution,

ACK. But their packages have a poor quality. They are bundling a dozen
of standard tools into a 'base' package, which makes it impossible to
update a single one:

| > rpm -ql base | grep bin
| /bin/egrep
| /bin/fgrep
| /bin/grep
| /bin/sed
| /bin/tar
| /sbin/hdparm
| /usr/bin/egrep
| /usr/bin/fgrep
| /usr/bin/grep
| /usr/bin/m4
| /usr/bin/sed
| /usr/bin/time
| /usr/bin/which
| /usr/sbin/freeramdisk
| /usr/sbin/klogconsole
| /usr/sbin/ksymoops

This makes you very dependent on SuSE...

Related is the missing distinction between program/library- and -devel
packages or crazy namings like 'shlibs' and 'libc' which are based on
the same src.rpm.

Although it is not erroneous not to reset the %release tag when %version is
increased, it is highly uncommon and SuSE seems to be the only distribution
using this practice.


> making sure the documentation is in the right place and so on.  But I
> wouldn't necessarily imitate them on the mechanics of writing spec
> files themselves.

ACK. Beside the facts named by you already, their absolute ignorance of
the `BuildRoot' tag makes it impossible to build own adaptations or just
to relink an application against an additional library.

Altogether, if you want to make consumers dependent on you, the SuSE
packaging seems to be a good way. But it does not met my definition of
good and compatible packaging.




Enrico