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

[Joe Nall]

On Jun 5, 2009, at 1:57 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:

> On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 14:40 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>> On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 10:31 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> It seems to me it'd make sense to convert all these kinds of  
>>> snippets
>>> into macros. Am I right, or is there a reason against doing this?
>>>
>>
>> When this was discussed for the example of GConf schemas in the
>> packaging committee a few weeks ago, there was quite a bit of  
>> pushback
>> about 'obscure macros' hiding whats really going on...
>
> Honestly, that just sounds silly. It's not obscuring things, it's a
> sensible level of abstraction and reuse.
>
> I suspect you'd have trouble selling that position to developers -
> "instead of calling functions from obscure external libraries, just  
> copy
> and paste the code from them into every single app you build!" I don't
> think that'd go down a storm. ;)

Libraries have well defined error handling. Macros can get pretty  
mysterious when they start failing. Poor analogy.

joe


>
> As long as there's a clear and sensible policy for how macros should  
> be
> implemented (what the files should be called and what packages they
> should go in), they wouldn't be 'obscure' at all. All you'd need to do
> to check what a given macro did would be 'grep
> (macroname) /etc/rpm/macros.*' or something similar.
> -- 
> Adam Williamson
> Fedora QA Community Monkey
> IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
> http://www.happyassassin.net
>
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