Re: question on conditional'd spec files

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

Hi,

> > Now, currently, we have one large spec file which generates close to 40
> > RPM's.

> Holy smokes!  40 rpms?!?!  And I gave the nautilus folks grief for their
> 7...  Does this all come out of the same source tree/tarball?  Has
> anybody looked into breaking it up into separate tarballs that can be
> built separately? 

As a matter of fact, yes, I've just succeeded in allowing the gstreamer
crowd to split up tarballs.  They didn't want too many, however, so we'll
be using about four of them.  I also have a version with about 1730
tarballs but that was more in jest because someone on irc suggested it as
an alternative.  (It's even downloadable at
http://urgent.rug.ac.be/thomas/gst, but we have released newer versions
since ;))

Anyway, the reason for there being 40+ rpm's is simple enough : gstreamer
is a platform that integrates other libraries, so each plugin that uses an
external library is packaged seperately.  This seems to be the best idea.
Now, if RPM had a "Suggests:" tag or something, we might not do this, but
as it is ... ;)

> > in gst-plugins.spec.in, I prefix each line pertaining to the mad package
> > with
> > @USE_MAD_TRUE@
> > 
> > This way, the package spec only ends up in the spec file when it's
> > actually being used.  This will take a lot of work, however, so I was
> > wondering how other, similarly large, packages handle this issue.
> 
> That's an interesting approach, though clearly lots of work.

Not too much, really.  It can be even done automatically.  and vim is nice
for stuff like this too.

In any case, it seems to do the trick, but I wonder why rpm does not allow
to build only one or a few of the rpms listed in the spec file.  That
should be relatively easy to implement, no ?

Thomas

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