%{?dist}, recommended or optional?

Michael Schwendt bugs.michael at gmx.net
Sun Jan 8 14:54:28 UTC 2006


On Sun, 08 Jan 2006 13:02:27 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 12:56 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> > On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 23:18 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > > Shall I go on? I still fail to see where you see a contradiction.
> > 
> > Perhaps it's just my bad English and the way different people think
> > about "contradiction".
> 
> Okay, I guess I now found it. It's perhaps my experience with standards.
> In the standards world, there is this thing called RFC 2119 (and similar
> documents), which defines "SHOULD" and "RECOMMENDED" to be different
> from "MAY" and "OPTIONAL". The RFC can be found here:
> 
> http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.html
> 
> SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
>         may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
>         particular item, but the full implications must be understood
>         and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
>         
> MAY This word, or the adjective "OPTIONAL", mean that an item is
>         truly optional. One vendor may choose to include the item
>         because a particular marketplace requires it or because the
>         vendor feels that it enhances the product while another vendor
>         may omit the same item. [...]
>         
> That's all that's confusing.

Well, conclusively %{?dist} is an optional macro which is recommended
by its lobbyists. ;-P

This is splitting-hairs. I believe the terminology in RFCs is defined
more strictly in order to avoid interoperability problems of different
implementations.  %{?dist}, being the least-significant portion of
a package EVR number, is not so important.  For all those packagers,
who use or prefer a different release versioning scheme, it is truely
optional. Whether carefully weighing the implications of using it or
not using it is required, I don't know. It doesn't add a lot of
complicated magic.




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