%{?dist} (was: Re: Request for a sponsor and a review of: pam_abl)

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sun, 2005-07-17 at 16:13 +0800, Jeff Pitman wrote:
> On Friday 15 July 2005 16:32, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > Btw, you've still not given a good reason why you want to enforce
> > %{?dist} on packagers. Where is the value in making it mandatory?
> 
> Never said that it should be mandatory.  I just don't want it to be 
> mandatory that noarch packages cannot have dist.  That's it!
Making not using %{?dist} for noarch package mandatory would be equally
wrong, because noarch package may also depend on distribution specific
features (e.g. the perl, python directories, other install dirs of other
files (cf. to the /usr/man vs. /usr/share/man switch, long ago) or on
presence/non-presence of certain other packages (e.g. perl modules
sometimes change their dependencies or built-time optional features
might be added/removed to a fedora release).

Ralf