svn or arch

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 12:55 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> --On Friday, December 17, 2004 3:21 PM -0500 Colin Walters 
> <walters at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > Second, get rid of the RPM changelog embedded in the spec file;
> > conceptually the goo to build a package is independent of the history of
> > that goo.  Just extract the history from the RCS, or have a separate
> > file, or something.
> 
> The changelog should reflect the history of the *packaging*, not the 
> package.

By "independent", I mean that you do not need the packaging history to
just build the package, and you don't need the build goo to read the
changelog.  The reason why globbing them together is bad is the same
reason that the magic CVS tags like $Id$ and $Log$ are bad - it screws
merging.

Independent things should be in separate files.  In the particular case
of the packaging history, since we now depend on an RCS, we can just
generate it from the RCS history when creating the SRPM (which is now
basically just a convenient single-file cache of the packaging).

> A lot of packages include a spec.in file which is then passed through sed 
> to install the version number in the spec file before a tarball is 
> generated. Eliminating this extra step would make it easier for upstreams 
> to provide RPM support by eliminating this extra step.

Yes; but you still have the rpm revision number.  I am arguing for its
removal entirely.  That's one less spurious thing you see in a diff
between branches, and one less thing to merge conflict on.