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

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On 05/20/2009 11:39 AM, Jussi Lehtola wrote:
> 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.
>
>
They're unnecessary but not wrong and they don't obscure the meaning 
very much.  I would be against having a ban in the Guidelines since it's 
adding something to the packager workload and another Guideline to have 
to look at when searching for what you really want for not much gain.

>
> 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?).

If you're interested in working on the coding for such a tool (or can 
find someone who is), I once worked on qa-assistant 
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/qa-assistant/

But I didn't have time for it anymore so I'd be happy to give someone 
interested in it access.

Also, there's several command line tools out there that do automated 
checking (as opposed to creating a checklist).  Those might be a better 
use of time to work on.

-Toshio