Macros in Source fields (was: Re: Prelink success story :))

Michael Schwendt ms-nospam-0306 at arcor.de
Fri Feb 27 10:33:21 UTC 2004


On Thu, 26 Feb 2004 23:36:13 -0500, Lamar Owen wrote:

> On Thursday 26 February 2004 8:30 pm, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > Is an URL which contains macros still an URL? What do you do with an URL
> > that contains macros? You can't cut'n'paste it into a browser, because it
> > contains macros. So why include protocol, hostname and path in Source
> > fields at all? How does the packager fetch a new release? Does he visit
> > the web page from bookmarks? Or does he reconstruct a valid URL from
> > the macros?
> 
> I have always used the pseudo-URL form as a reminder of where to get the 
> source for PostgreSQL.  It's not a true URL, and mine do contain macros.  And 
> will continue to contain macros.  Not that I need much of a reminder anyway, 
> since the URL in the spec is not how I get the source, since the real path 
> via scp is not the URL. :-)

This is not about voting how to do it.

All that has been pointed out is that reviewers appreciate ready-to-use
URLs, which they can cut'n'paste into console or browser to fetch a
tarball from upstream. It has been pointed out that some packagers
tend to obfuscate URLs with macros to a degree that is far from smart,
e.g.

  Source0:  http://foo.bar/%{name}/%{version}/%{name}-%{version}rc1.tar.gz

and that is bad taste and bad style. Or it turns out, the URL hasn't been
updated or verified in a longer time and is not true anymore.

-- 





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