The Future of Fedora Package Management and the RPM Philosophy

[Simo Sorce]

On Sat, 2007-06-09 at 19:33 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 09, 2007 at 09:13:11AM +0200, Jos Vos wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 07:58:03PM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > 
> > > - Don't make me increment integers (Release); this is
> > >   what computers (i.e. the build system) are for
> > 
> > Whatever you suggest to change, be sure that the final spec file
> > contains a real integer, not a macro defined in the build system
> > or so.
> > 
> > It's already very discussable that %{?dist} is now used in the
> > release tags.  I know this was introduced to overcome a - what
> > you can maybe call - shortcome in RPM, but it has its drawbacks
> > and every use of non-standard externally defined macros violates
> > the principles of RPM, being able to reproduce package building.
> 
> But the disttag is designed in such a way as to also work when there
> is no definition for it.

Wouldn't it make sense to add a make newrelease command that greps the
existing tag from cvs and retrieves the current release number.
Then use sed/awk/perl/whatever to increment it (in a sensible way) and
writes it down into the spec, and, while there, also creates a new
changelog entry with the current date and person/email information.

This would be a useful tool and also not mandatory, if you have some
specific need you can still go and do things manually.

Simo.