no xfce for FC4?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 09:38:00 +0100, Iago Rubio wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 00:19 -0600, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 12:35 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > 
> > >I'm hoping to get some good feedback from the specs/packages and find
> > >someone interested in sponsoring me to maintain the xfce packages in
> > >fedora extras. 
> > 
> > I'm not an xfce user, but I took the time tonight to download your SRPMs
> > to review them. A few items of note:
> > 
> > All packages:
> > 
> > -Source0:
> > http://www.xfce.org/archive/xfce-4.0.3/src/%{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
> > +Source:
> > http://www.us.xfce.org/archive/xfce-4.2.0/src-bz2/libxfce4mcs-4.2.0.tar.bz2
> > 
> > Fixing the link is good, but I'd prefer you kept the Source0. 
> 
> I getting a bit confused with this.
> 
> I've just changed al urls in one package I maintain to fit with this:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingGuidelines#head-899bd694d29ace1be956ab35177075021977560b
> 
> [quote]
> Please avoid using macros in the source URLs, prefer, for example, 
> 
>         http://dl.sf.net/someproject/1.0/someproject-1.0.tar.bz2 
> 
> over 
> 
>         http://dl.sf.net/%{name}/%{version}/%{name}-%{version}.tar.bz2 
> 
> While using macros saves you as a package maintainer some time whenever
> you update the package, QA will have to reconstruct the source URL
> manually when the validity of the sources is checked. 
> [/quote]
> 
> Please, Could anyone give us an athoritative answer on this ?
> 
> What should be used in urls, macros or hardcoded urls ?

It's simple. 

The background of the "no macros in download URLs" guideline is from
fedora.us times.

This was to make sure that

 * Source URL in spec file and actual download URL are the same

 * package reviewers need not play with macro magic before they
   could cut'n'paste an URL and feed it to wget/curl

 * any Source URLs are verifyable easily

When the packager downloads a new release, a macro-less URL is used
and ought to be copied into the spec file to keep it in sync.

Something like this is not smart, it's madness:

    http://dl.sf.net/%{name}/%{version}/%{name}-%{version}.tar.bz2 

How often does %name change both in your package and upstream at the same
time? Most likely the entire URL changes more often, when e.g. a project
moves. How long does it take before you can be sure that releases always
are put into a sub-directory named %version?

But overall, when you have CVS access and you maintain a package in CVS
yourself and you don't depend on security relevant reviews, hardly anyone
cares whether you pave your spec file with macros where they don't really
add any value. ;)