Packaging collaboration between distributions

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi,

A while back I noticed http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Policies/Licensing 
relying on Fedora licensing guidelines. This makes perfect sense since 
we have comprehensive guidelines and listing of licenses but this isn't 
a very active form of collaboration. Packaging between between 
distributions differ unnecessarily on technical minutia that isn't a 
selling point of any sort and just wastes time. Taking just RPM based 
distributions, we have Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSUSE etc building a 
packaging community on its own, they have differences in atleast the 
following things:

  * Package names and granularity
  * Location of files
  * Unique Configuration files
  * Vendor macros

Trying to reuse spec files from other distributions tends to be a pain 
because of this in many cases. Since the new rpm.org has now 
successfully done a few releases consolidating patches from different 
distributions, would it be possible to collaborate more on and 
consolidate macros etc so that it makes it easy for distributions to 
alteast share and reuse spec files as much as possible. Note that binary 
compatibility is specifically not a goal here.

Obviously there are going to be differences in between distributions but 
there should be a lot of common guidelines we can place in somewhere 
like http://rpm.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines and just point out the 
differences where applicable. We could setup a neutral 
distribution-collaboration list and invite distributions to see what can 
be done.Does that sound feasible? I would be very interested in helping 
out.

Rahul