Re: Two questions about making rpms work on multiple OS versions

["Axel Liljencrantz" <liljencrantz gmail com>]

On 3/25/06, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas mailhot laposte net> wrote:
> If you really want a multi-distro spec you need to depend on actual
> filenames, not package names (to get around package naming mismatches),
> and do define tricks when the files themselves moved
>
> (see
> http://www.jpackage.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/rpms/free/mod_jk/mod_jk.spec?root=jpackage&view=markup&rev=1.1.2.5.2.6 for a real convoluted example)

Thanks. Looking at your example, I came up with the following:

%define xinclude %( if test -d /usr/X11R6/include; then echo
/usr/X11R6/include; else echo /usr\/include; fi )
...
BuildRequires:          %{xinclude}/X11/StringDefs.h, %{xinclude}/X11/Xlib.h
BuildRequires:          %{xinclude}/X11/Intrinsic.h, %{xinclude}/X11/Xatom.h

I don't know enough about what packages create what directories to
know how close to foolproof the above test is, but the only
alternative I can see is checking the redhat-release file, and that's
not very reliable either.

>
> As for building a single binary and using it everywhere I really would
> not advice it, even it you do static linking. It's far safer to rebuild
> the package on the actual distro(s) targeted

The obvious trouble with that solution is that I am a single
individual with limited resources and funds. I don't have the time,
the equipment or the money to invest in a farm of computers running
multiple versions of Redhat, Mandriva and Suse. Using Qemu or some
other emulator would help, but I still need more memory and more disk
space than I have today.

Also, the list of downloads is too long already, I don't want to
provide 20 more downloadable files.

>
> Unless you want to learn far more about glibc internals that you ever
> wanted to know

I was under the impression that as long as you only use standard C
library functions, the LSB would mean that you are reasonably safe. Oh
well.

I guess this means that the only solution I have is to provide
tarballs and hope that people on the respective distros will start
packaging things themselves. I guess it might happen, there are
already packagers for debian, gentoo, arch and rpath.

But it still leavs a sour taste - elf-based libraries are supposed to
be so much more advanced than Windows dll:s, but still library
versioning seems to be no better (possibly worse) than under Windows.
Oh well, I guess it's not RPM:s fault.

>
> --
> Nicolas Mailhot
>


--
Axel