[Fedora-packaging] Use of macros for standard commands & wishlist of helper programs

[Jussi Lehtola]

Hi,


First: should we have a policy of using macros for standard commands?
RPM includes standard macros such as %{__mv}, %{__rm}, %{__mkdir},
%{__cp}, %{__python}, %{__perl} and so on, which are used by some
people.

I find that the use of these macros unnecessarily obscures the spec file
and thus would like to have the ban on these as part of the Packaging
Guidelines.



Second, a packager's / reviewer's software wishlist:


- Is there some tool to check out the redundancy of Requires and
BuildRequires? If not, it should be quite trivial to code, since all the
tool would need to do is pull the full requirement tree for each R and
BR and crosscheck whether there is overlap.

Of course, I would do this myself but I'm not as familiar as I should be
with a) python, b) yum bindings or c) GUI programming to code such a
thing.



- Also a some kind of review helper tool would be nice. This should have
preferably (skeleton) input files in text for different types of
reviews: C libraries, python modules etc could all have a customized
review checklist.

The tool would then present the GUI checklist formed from the skeleton
input file, with a tab of possible resolutions (e.g. OK, NEEDSWORK,
N/A, ?) and a comment text box for each item.

The output could be saved to a text file and pasted into the review in
BZ (or the tool could even have a direct connection with BZ?).
-- 
Jussi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
jussilehtola at fedoraproject.org