Proposal (and yes, I'm willing to do stuff!): Must Use More Macros

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 11:43 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> To some extent, yes.  macros can go overboard, though.  I think that the
> macros you're planning are going to make sense, though :-)

Thanks.

> The way to get these changed is to first go through the Packaging
> Committee to get the changes approved, then have the macros merged into
> the packages that will provide them.  Then patch the packages that
> should be updated.

Would it be best to have the concrete implementation (or at least some
examples) built before taking it to the packaging committee, or no?

> Note: I remember one argument against macros being that they make spec
> files harder to port between distros but I'm not willing to champion
> that argument.  If someone else does, I'll certainly listen to the
> reasoning, though. :-)

The obvious answer to that is to try and standardize macro usage between
distributions, not to not use macros. For e.g., I revamped the Mandriva
Tcl packaging policy late last year: I took the macro names and even
code snippets from Fedora's Tcl policy. I just implemented them as
system-wide macros in the tcl-devel package instead of writing in the
policy that they should be re-defined at the top of every spec file :)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net