Kind request: fix your packages

Sean Middleditch elanthis at awesomeplay.com
Wed Oct 1 19:34:32 UTC 2003


On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 15:16, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > Packages depend on other packages, not the text in /etc/*-release.  Fix
> > your packages and move on to complain about real problems.  ;-)
> 
> Well, so far it has been easier to simply analyze /etc/redhat-release
> and add conditional code to spec files. Conditional code that toggles
> platform-specific patches, build requirements, source code
> configuration parameters, and things like that.
> 
> What you're asking for is that a packager puts much more work into
> analyzing build requirements directly in order to determine the build
> platform. Effectively that would duplicate the work of a software's
> "configure" script. There must be a cheap way to determine the build
> platform. /etc/redhat-release or /etc/fedora-release is one and
> hopefully will stay one.

No, you need to actually do the work of the configure script (perhaps
you should actually use the app's configure script) - detect the
individual bits in the system.  Otherwise your package is broken.  It's
a lie to say that a package is an "RH8.0 package," because that's where
you built it, when it runs on RH9 and FC1.  Which is a very common case,
I might note.

If you take the cheap way out, then you have a poorly packaged
application.  You also completely defeat the entire purpose of using a
package manager like RPM; you might as well just go to using Slackware
.tgz files.

If it *is* so hard to do the proper feature detection at RPM build-time,
then perhaps some fixes to RPM are in order.  If any fixing is going to
be done, let's fix the *real* problem, not fix the workaround to the
problem.  ;-)

Perhaps a comprehensive set of common system configuration checking
macros, similar to how autoconf is built, would work well?  So packagers
can very very easily and cleanly detect which versions of major packages
or subsystems are installed.  If something like that existed and was
well built, nobody would've even bothered using a broken hack like
distro release checking to begin with.  ^,^

-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.





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