Call for developers: rpmbuilder

[Chris Evich]

> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 1:30 PM, Chris Evich <cevich redhat com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Hopefully this is the right mailing list :)
>>
>> Project rpmbuilder aims to provide a template-based approach to packaging.  In
>> other words, it removes responsibility from developer to produce an RPM spec
>> file the "right" way.  Instead, the package developer just feeds in his
>> project's particulars, and a template-driven engine puts the pieces together
>> and spits out a "sane" RPM and SRPM.
>>
>> https://fedorahosted.org/rpmbuilder
> 
> Personally I would rather see Fedora heavily invest in reducing all
> the overhead that currently exists in packaging and putting more
> intelligence into the core of the system, rather than generating spec
> files.  Editing spec files is already painful enough; editing
> generated ones sounds even less fun.  Essentially if the build system
> knows about things like the Ruby gem specs, Python setup.py, Java's
> Maven, freedesktop.org autotools-based desktop packages, etc., then
> you don't need to autogenerate a lot of spec boilerplate.
> 

Actually, I completely agree, and this project is intended to address the
hand-editing you describe.  The templates rpmbuilder uses will be shipped
_with it_, I'm not suggesting yet-another-thing-to-edit-when-packaging :)
Then, different templates may be specified at packaging time depending on the
"thing" to be packaged.

For example, I could envision a template for packaging python "stuff" that
uses a setup.py when resolving a python-rpmbuilder template.  In other words,
it should be as simple as:

# rpmbuilder --mode=python --pkgname=MyRPMPackageName
 --version=1.2.3 --release=4 --sourcedir=. --destdir=.

The result would be, ./MyRPMPackageName-1.2.4-4.noarch.rpm and/or
./MyRPMPackageName-1.2.4-4.noarch.srpm are written to CWD.

Though this could easily extend to other scripting languages / build
environments as well.  All that's needed is someone to develop a template once.