Python, distutils, rpmbuild, issues

[Jeff Spaleta]

2009/1/6 Gerry Reno <greno at verizon.net>:
> My goal is to only use 'bdist' and 'bdist_rpm' configured using setup.cfg to
> generate apt and rpm files for various distros.  This sure simplifies
> things.  Are you saying that this is not going to be possible with
> Fedora/RedHat?

Whether or not you can get bdist to comply with our python packaging
policies or not is an open question.  The pre-release versioning is
just one potential problem..general to any packaging effort.  We also
have language specific best practises which apply to python
applications.  Those best practices evolve over time.

We have human reviewers who check submissions to make sure submissions
meet the current packaging guidance.  If you can get bdist generated
specfiles to comply with those best practises, then reviewers won't
know its a generated spec unless you tell them.  But how much effort
it will take for you to get bdist to conform to our guidance is
something we can't tell you.  The fact that it has problems with
version numbering for pre-releases which do not work for standard rpm
alphanumeric parsing rules isn't encouraging and that's not even a
Fedora specific policy statement..that's an rpm-ism which reaches
across rpm based distributions.

-jef