Encouraging the use of multiple packaging systems on one systems, and the resulting problems (was: re: /usr/local)

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Friday, October 21, 2005 10:28 PM -0700 "Michael A. Peters" 
<mpeters at mac.com> wrote:

> Users should not be expected to learn how to package rpm's unless they
> need to learn it for another reason. I do think that developers should
> learn rpm so they can provide a *quality* generic spec file, some spec
> files I've seen are just scary (and often not generated by autoconf so
> the version ends up being wrong if they don't remember to manually
> update it for a new release)

Right. Anyone who can learn how to use autoconf or Make should be able to 
write a simple spec file. Then the end user can issue "rpmbuild -ta 
xxx.tar.gz" instead of "configure/make/make install".

Does autoconf now have the ability to write spec files? If so, that could 
simplify this issue for a lot of developers.