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

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2009-06-08 at 13:31 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le dimanche 07 juin 2009 à 12:31 +0300, Panu Matilainen a écrit :
> 
> > Btw your initial suggestion of collecting the common stuff into macros 
> > and converting packages to use them would be useful on several ways:
> > a) Finding out the things that *are* common among lots of packages. While
> >     numerous cases are well and widely known already, I suspect there might
> >     be some that are only specific groups know about (possibly eg java
> >     related packages, I dunno).
> > b) Making the usages of the common patterns easy to spot by grepping.
> > c) The transition period cruft can be hidden inside the common macros
> >     without polluting every spec with it.
> 
> Won't work IMHO. One characteristic of pre-macroized specs is that their
> authors have found lots of "interesting" ways to do about the same thing
> with different instructions (usually missing some problems). If you
> don't want this old processing to collide and interfere with your new
> shiny processing you need the call to the new processing to be explicit,
> so packagers can check for problems before enabling it.

I'm not planning to re-implement anything, just change things that are
currently snippets of code you have to copy and paste from the
guidelines to be macros instead. All it involves is taking the snippets
and putting them into a /etc/macros.* file.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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