%{?dist}, recommended or optional?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 19:30 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 15:38 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > Where is the part you find "somehow contradicting"? In all three quotes,
> > using %{?dist} is either recommended or described as being optional.
> > This dist tag macro exists in order to aid you. "recommended" is not
> > equal to "mandatory".
> 
> I'm not talking about mandatory. I'm talking about the difference
> between "optional", as in "use it if you think you should", and
> "recommended", as in "use it if you are not sure you may need it or
> not".
> 
> In some cases, when the packager has no strong feeling either way and he
> is tempted to not use it to avoid making the tag more complex, should he
> use it or not? For an example, see:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=177096
> where if I add the tag, the version will be something like
> "2.0-0.1.20060103cvs.fc4", which I call ugly.

What possible good reason could there be to argue for cosmetics over
functionality in this case?  "Recommended" is exactly what it says --
experienced individuals have determined that %{?dist} is useful, and
thus their advice is to use it.  It keeps you from having to maintain
separate spec files per distribution release, which will save you time
and effort should the build or installation dependencies diverge at some
point.  If you don't want to take advantage of those features, don't use
it; how you spend your free time is entirely up to you. ;-)

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
 Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
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